God And Mmon

GOD

AND

MAMMON

THE RELATIONS OF
RELIGION AND ECONOMICS

By J. A. HOBSON

33o^\

r^CONOMICS IN PRIMITIVE
RELIGIONS

THOLICISM AND ECONOMIC
LIFE

)TESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

E CHURCHES AND MODERN
ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS

m

PRICE ONE SHILLING NET

GOD AND MAMMON

THE FORUM SERIES

1. — THE STREAM OF LIFE. By Julian S. Huxlby.

“ It would be hard to find a better or more stimulating intro-
duction to the general study of biology.” — Manch, Guard.

2. — THE RELIGION OF AN ARTIST.

By the Hon. John Collier.

“ It could hardly be improved .” — Nation and Athenasum.

3. — MR. BELLOC OBJECTS TO “THE OUTLINE OF

HISTORY.” An acute and masterly criticism.

By H. G. Wells.

4. — ^THE GOODNESS OF GODS. By Edward Wbstermarck.

Dr. Westermarck wields a facile pen, and he has never used
it to greater effect than he has done in this delightful work.

6.-~CONCERNING MAN’S ORIGIN.

By Prof. Sir Arthur Keith.
The Presidential Address to the British Association, 1927
(with additions), and other Essays.

6. — THE EARTH; ITS NATURE AND HISTORY.

By Edward Greenly, D.Sc., F.G.S.
“For the beginner in the science of geology it is one of the
most useful books yet published.” — Sheffield Daily Telegraph,

7. — CRAFTSMANSHIP AND SCIENCE.

By Prof. Sir William H. Bragg.
The Presidential Address to the British Association, 1928,
with supplementary Essays.

8. — DARWINISM AND WHAT IT IMPLIES.

By Prof. Sir Arthur KBirii.
Contains the famous Ludwig Mond loc^ture, dealing with
Immortality.

9. — WHAT IS EUGENICS ? By Major Leonard Darwin.

“The book is the best brief answer yet published to the
question the title asks.” — Nation.

10. — THE MEANING OF LIFE, AS SHOWN IN THE

PROCESS OF EVOLUTION. By C. E. M. Joad.

A subtle and powerful exposition of Vitalism.

11. — FROM METEORITE TO MAN: The Evolution of the

Earth. By Prof. J. W. Gregory, Sir A. S. Woodward,
Prof. W. W. Watts, and Prof. A. C. Seward.

12. — RELIGION AS A BAR TO PROGRESS.

By Charles T. Gorham.

The Forum Series. — No. 13.

GOD AND MAMMON

THE RELATIONS OF
RELIGION AND ECONOMICS

BY

J. A. HOBSON

London :

WATTS & CO.,

5 & 6 Johnson’s court, fleet street, E.c.4.

rmST PUBU8UBD, JUNE 1931

PRINTED AND PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS
A8SOOUTION LIMITED BT C. A. WATTS & 00. LIMITED, 5 & C JOHNSON’S
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PREFACE

T his brief attempt at an intelligible analysis and survey of
the relations between economics and religion has some
difficulties to encounter. Even had I possessed the necessary
knowledge, spacial limits would have precluded an extension
9 ! my enquiry into all or most of the great religions of the
world. Even the most condensed statement of facts in so
many fields would have left no scope for the necessary interpre-
tation.

Under such circumstances it seemed best, after a short
preliminary chapter dealing with the beginnings of the con-
fiicts and compromises of God and Mammon as shown in the
life of primitive man, to confine myself to selected studies in
medieval and modern Christianity, and in the business life
coeval with these religious phases, so as to bring out most
clearly the mingled aspects of discord and harmony.

Particular attention is given to the attitude adopted towards
modern business life by what Matthew Arnold termed “ the
Protestantism of the Protestant Religion ” as illustrated in the
Calvinist churches of Western Europe, in Wesleyanism,
among Baptists and Quakers, chiefly in Britain and the
United States. The material aid rendered by God and
Mammon to one another in the pursuit of this world’s goods
demands a closer psychological analysis than has here been
possible. But 1 take it to be a main purpose of this Forum
Series to stimulate thought and evoke study in many readers.
Though an increasing volume of attention Ws in recent years
been devoted to the relation between Capitalism and Religion,
some of the richest fields still remain unexplored. Readers
of this essay will readily recognise how deep a debt I owe to
Mr. R. H. Tawney’s work. Religion and the Rise of Gapitalim,
as well as to several other recent writers.

J. A. H.

February, 1931

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. Economics in Primitive Religions . . 1

IL Catholicism and Economic Life ... 9

III. Protestantism and Business ... 22

IV. The Churches and Modern Economic Move-

ments ....... 44

VI

Chaptee I

Economics in Primitive Religions

P RIMITIVE man cannot be properly described as either
an economic or a religious being. But in his earliest
history we can discern in him groups of instinctive and con-
scious urges and activities which led him later on to the
distinction between the satisfaction of his bodily needs and
that of his spiritual needs. From the beginning both the
opposition and the co-operation of economics and religion,
(^od and Mammon, were latent in man’s life. We see him,
first, an animal among other animals, seeking to eat and to
avoid being eaten, superior to other animals in using and
making shelter, and in getting weapons, tools, coverings, and
ornaments from the material of his environment, instead of
growing them as parts of his body. Thus forced to explore
the place in which he lives, in order to utilize its resources for
the protection of himself and his species, he comes to realize
nature as containing powers partly friendly, partly hostile,
to his life. His dawning imagination dwells more upon the
irregular and hostile activities of nature than upon the normal
and friendly ones. Storms, pestUences, droughts, famines,
floods, and other perilous eccentricities of nature work power-
fully upon his mind. He easily comes to attribute such
happenings to inimical powers inhabiting and moving natural
objects, which must be circumvented or appeased. His early
endeavours to influence nature were not by methods we can
call religious. He did not at first conceive nature as operated
by gods or other beings like himself though stronger. But he
recognized forces of nature that might be affected favourably
in their working by what we call Magic. Frazer, in his great
study, The OoMen Bough, distinguishes two sorts of Magic —
imitative and contagious. You could get rain by pouring
some water on the ground, giving “ the tip,” so to speak, to
the clouds, or you could injure your enemy hy getting posses-
sion of a bit of him, his hair or nail clippings, or by making
an image of him, or even by the injurious use of his name.

1

2 ECONOMICS IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS

But not everyone knew enough of the mysterious ways
of nature to do such things successfully. So in a tribe the
magician, witch doctor, or wizard would gain recognition as
an expert, knowing and influencing the ways of nature. Such
magic may be accounted the beginning both of science and
religion, which for some little distance went hand-in-hand
together.

Doubtless the keener imagination of certain men came very
early to endow the forces of nature with wills, desires, and
purposes like those they felt working in themselves, and with
some sort of person operating them. So came animism, a sort
of half-way house on the road to definite religion. Some
anima, or spirit, inhabited each bit of organic nature ; each
tree or shrub, and all moving objects of inorganic nature,
stars, ocean, rivers, the very earth itself, were the residence
of some ruling spirit. Though fear was the chief begetter of
religion,^ it was not the only ingredient in early religious belief
and emotion. The survival of the souls of the dead in some
sort of existence was an early widespread belief ; and some
reverent regard tempered the fear which doubtless pre-
dominated among the survivors who “ worshipped ” these
ancestors. Nor can we disregard some sentiment of the
sublime and beautiful in the feelings of early man towards the
most impressive beings in nature. As personification became
more distinct, we cannot wonder that the sun, the moon,
mother-earth and her generative powers became objects of
worship, chiefly for the benefits they could confer upon or
withhold from man, but also on their own account for the
majesty of their form and power.

We get a strong touch of this sentiment in the language
Milton puts into the mouth of Satan : —

Oh, thou who with surpassing beauty crown’d
Lookst from thy sole dominion like the God
Of this new earth — on thee I call.

But early worship was predominantly fear, and continued to
be so through the development of what are called the higher
reli^ons. Indeed, modern Christianity, though sometimes
telling its followers that “ God is love,*' still speaks of a devout
Christian as a god-fearing, not a god-loving, man.

Man’s discovery or invention of divine beings peopling and
conducting nature is seen to be itself a very natural process.

^ Mr. Warde Fowler, in his Social Life of Rome (p. 343), speaks of
“ this feeling of fear or nervousness which lies at the root of the meaning
of the word religion

3

ECONOMICS IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS

As animism replaced cruder magic in the human interpreta-
tion of natural forces, it fell to the priest, or priest-king, to
displace the magician, and to gather into his hands the fear,
reverence, and regard due to one who knew how to conciliate
the Higher Powers. The multiplicity of private local godlets
grew into a hierarchy of potentates, as wider communications
enlarged the smaller tribal life, or conquest placed an invading
people’s gods in a higher spiritual status than those of the
conquered people.

It is not my concern here to attempt to trace the separate
or mingled growth of the great religions in Babylon, Sumeria,
Assyria, India, and Egypt, with the various changing rituals
of prayer and sacrifice. My task is to try to indicate the
relations of interdependence and opposition between the
material and spiritual aspects of human life, as they show
themselves in the evolution of economic processes on the one
hand, and of religious institutions on the other.

The story of God and Mammon is largely, but not wholly,
an economic interpretation of history. For throughout
human history it has always been difficult to distinguish the
economic from the other vital activities of man. Strictly
speaking, the economic life does not arise until trading has
begun, with some division of labour yielding to each man a
surplus of certain goods beyond his own needs, which he can
exchange for the surpluses of other goods belonging to other
men. Even after this division or specialization of labour,
with exchange of surplus, has come about, a good deal of
useful and even necessary work is done within the home, on
which no price is set, and which does not enter into economic
reckoning. Until money has come into general use for the
appraisal and exchange of goods and services, wealth as an
economic term continues to be vague, and much serviceable
energy still lies outside the category of “ economic.” In
primitive life most of man’s efforts must be devoted to main-
taining the life of the individual, the family, and the tribe.
Most thinking and planning, as well as action, were devoted to
this end. Hunter, fisher, farmer, fighter, seek to get food and
protection for their folk from the natural environment, or by
robbery and conquest. Magic first, afterwards religion, was
invoked to assist them in these vitally necessary tasks. “ In
primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule,
and the distribution of the community into various classes
of workers has hardly begun, every man is more^or less his
own magician ; he practises charms and incantations for his
own good and the injury of his enemies. But a great step in

4 ECONOMICS IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS

advance has been taken when a special class of magicians has
been instituted; when, in other words, a number of men
have been set apart for the express purpose of benefiting the
whole community by their skill, whether that skill be directed
to the healing of diseases, the regulation of the weather, or
any other object of general utility.” ^ When magic passed
through the animist stage into religion, and priesthoods pro-
vided themselves with sacred groves, shrines, temples, and
the proper trappings of a deity, no essential change took
place in the relations between the material and the spiritual
life.

These relations were very close. The magician, priest, or
priest-king, possessing spiritual influence with a great god, or
himself a god, was the first professional parasite, the first
person capable of living upon the products of other people’s
labour, whether bestowed as voluntary gifts, blackmail, or
sacrifices to the gods. His was a perilous life. For the
reverence and sanctity accorded to him as representative of
the god were easily upset. In a very real sense his income was
“ payment by results.” He must deliver the goods, produce
rain or fair weather when needed for the crops, stop pestilences
and other troubles. Something could be done by skilled
prophecy — e.^., he could “ produce ” rain when rain was
coming, and perform effective rites of fertilization in spring-
time. But any calamitous failure was taken to prove in-
capacity or malice. On such occasions you would beat your
god, or put to death his minister. In some ways primitive
religion was more sincere than ours. We still pray for rain
and for good harvests, but we do not kill our parsons when
their prayers fail.

Not o^y primitive man, but civilized peoples, who had
invented tools to aid their labour, still recognized their depend-
ence upon the natural resources and the fecundity of nature
for their successful livelihood. It is not too much to say that
this fecundity of nature was the first consideration in the great
religions of the world, whether of Ra, Zeus, Ammon, Mithra,
or some other Sun-god, or some female deity of fertility such
as Cybele or Ceres. Even where, as among the Celts, official
religion was solar, all their chief festivals relating to points
in the sun’s progress during the year, this sun-worship cannot
be detached from the worshipful regard to the generative
processes in the vegetable and animal world. Earth was con-
ceived as the mother-element, and the idea of the mother-
goddess prevailed in ancient times from India to Ireland.

^ Frazer, The Oolden Bough, Abridged Edition, p. 61.

ECONOMICS IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS 6

The account given in The Golden Bough of the worship of
Adonis indicates how far the older magic had survived in the
early religions of the East. The “ gardens of Adonis ” were
“ baskets or pots filled with earth, in which wheat, barley,
lettuces, fennel, and various kinds of flowers were sown and
tended for eight days, chiefly or exclusively by women.
Fostered by the sun’s heat, the plants shot up rapidly;
but, having no root, they withered as rapidly away, and
at the end of eight days were carried out with the images of
the dead Adonis, and flung with them into the sea or into
springs.” “The rapid growth of the wheat and barley in
the gardens of Adonis was intended to make the corn shoot
up; and the throwing of the gardens and the images into
the water was a charm to secure a due supply of fertilizing
rain.” ^

In India, Sicily, Sardinia, the custom still survives, though
in the two latter countries St. John has replaced Adonis, and
the Easter celebration of the dead and risen Christ has been
grafted on to the earlier ritual in celebration of the dead and
risen Adonis.

If these early religions were definitely directed to aid man in
what may be called his economic purposes, through bringing
spiritual influences to bear upon crops and herds and other
requisites of life, a new potent economic situation arose.
To the priesthood in charge of the shrines or temples a large
part of the “ surplus ” wealth of the people passed. Not
only gifts of food and sacrificial offerings came to them in
order to win the favour of the god or avert his ill-will, but the
temples soon began to be used as treasuries in which durable
articles of value, gold, silver, precious stones, objects of art,
could find a secure resting-place. Where, as in Egypt or
Babylon, the material arts of civilization enabled much slave
or other labour to be applied to the production of these
luxuries, the safest repositories of such wealth were the
palaces and tombs of god-kings, or the temples of their
priests.

Here religion was able to exercise a double influence upon
economic life — ^first, to extract “ for services rendered ” a
large and increasing share of the growing “ surplus ” wealth
of a rising civilization with improving arts of production;
secondly, to safeguard such stored treasures by the religious
sentiment which in an age of violence protected them against
sacrilegious pillage. Thieves would not break through and
steal; even invaders sometimes spared the shrines of alien
^ Frazer, op. cit, p. 341.

6 ECONOMICS IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS

but recognized deities.^ When valuable metals became the
medium of purchase and exchange the temples became the
most available storehouses. Indeed, Mr. A. R. Burns ^ says
that silver from the temple hoard was put into circulation to
facilitate trade, as notes are now withdrawn from the banks.
Again, a closer early connection between God and Mammon
is suggested by Mr. Hawtrey, who tells us ^ that the word
‘ money ’ is believed to be derived from Moneta, an attribute of
the Roman goddess Juno, because the ancient Roman mint was
established in the temple of Juno Moneta.” Though much
treasure became the property of the temple or its priesthood,
there is evidence that kings made use of the temples to keep
metallic reserves in the shape of bars of gold, silver, or valuable
metals against the needs of wartime or other emergencies,
placing them under the protection of the gods. The ordinary
Greek temple contained a treasury building for the deposit
of local offerings, as did the shrines of Olympia and Delphi on
a larger national scale. ^

Thus we find from the earliest times in various countries
of the ancient world a reciprocity of services between God and
Mammon — religion and industry. The gods gave protection
against enemies in war, promoted vegetation and animal
fertility, and gave “ luck ” in hunting, fishing, and agriculture.
In return, the priests got treasures for their temples, food and
other necessaries and comforts for themselves, including as a
rule male and female slaves for their support and enjoyment.
In Asiatic and African countries, where slave labour was
abundant under despotic rule, a large and increasing part of
such treasure as did not rust or decay came to be deposited in
the temples. This was certainly the case in Egypt, Babylon,
Chaldea, Syria, India, and to a less extent in Greece, where

^ In Italy, where brigandage was bolder than elsewhere, holiness was
not always a sufficient protection, for Cicero tells of thefts of statues
and other temple property {de Natura Deorum, i, 29. 52).

* Money and Monetary Policy in Early Times,

* Artic le “ Money ” in Encyclopaedia Britannica.

* The Chapel or Chamber of the Pyx of Westminster Abbey, which
forms part of Edward the Confessor’s mona^stic building, though
originally used as a chapel, became later the Abbots’ Treasury, and many
sacred relics were preserved there. Subsequently it became the
depository of the “ pyx ” or box containing the Exchequer trialplates
of gold and silver used as standards of reference at the periodical tests
of the weight and fineness of the coins of the realm. These tests,
known as “ trials of the pyx,” were held at Westminster till 1842. At
the Dissolution the Chapel of the Pyx (the Abbots* Treasury), with the
Cliapter House and the Royal Treasury below it, were retained under
Royal jurisdiction, and are still under the charge, not of the Abbey
authorities, but of the officials of the Palace of Westminster.

ECONOMICS IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS 7

slave labour was less abundant. The wealth and leisure thus
secured to the temples and the priestly castes stimulated
among them the beginnings of culture in literature, science,
and the fine arts of music, architecture, sculpture, painting,
dancing, thus laying the foundations of many of the higher
crafts and industries that spread in secular life.

In thus presenting the early relations of God and Mammon
in the light of reciprocity of services, we cannot, however,
ignore the fact that whereas the Mammon, typifying wealth
and industry, played his part fairly, making good and abundant
payment at the holy shrines, the god’s priestly representatives
rendered no substantial services in return, unless we conceive
any sort of belief in higher powers to be better than none.
Though the believers in these gods doubtless regarded them-
selves as getting a real “ quid pro quo,” when, in return for
gifts and sacrifices, the priests undertook to procure the aid
or avert the hostility of the gods, the fact that these religious
goods were not genuine is a highly relevant consideration in
our thesis. Perhaps still more important is the well-attested
fact that, while the ordinary priest or soothsayer, accepting
easily the current traditions, was sincere in holding that his
performance of ritual was actually serviceable in influencing
gods, the keener- witted members of the priesthood were often
sceptics, and secretly derided the ceremonial dupery they
practised. Augur winked to augur, as they passed.

Though occasionally bolder sceptics became open heretics
and reformers, many more remained at their profitable posts,
as hypocrites. For open sceptics and nonconformists were not
tolerated in times when kings were gods or demi-gods, and
when questioning accepted religious rites was treason as well
as sacrilege. The gravest moral damage of these religions
consisted, not in the fact that their deities were unreal and so
incapable of performing the high functions ascribed to them,
but in that the minds of the most intelligent men of the ages
were poisoned by consciously false conformity. Sincerity in
belief is always a matter of degree, and, while few priests in
primitive or even more civilized communities may have been
clear-eyed sceptics, many must have kept on smothering
doubts about the efficacy of their rituals, thus debasing the
moral currency of their society.

The less sincere the religious professions that they held,
the laxer their creed, the more rigorous would be their addiction
to the worldly contacts which enabled those who had renounced
treasures in another world to accumulate treasures in this.
If the successful researches into the material remains of Ur

8 ECONOMICS IN PRIMITIVE RELIGIONS

of the Chaldees, Thebes, Babylon, or Crete could lay open the
psychology of the priesthood in their shrines and temples, it
would furnish a wealth of mingled “ rationalization ” and
h 3 rpocrisy even more deserving of attention than the products
of art and industry which surprise our world to-day.

Chapter II

Catholicism and Economic Life

S O far we have treated the relations of God and Mammon
as, upon the whole, those of co-operation and mutual sup-
port. But the attitude of conscious and intense conflict which
appears in all the higher or more “ spiritual ’’ religions is of
equal importance. In all the early religions these elements
of conflict are apt to appear. The fear of unknown powers,
the importance of omens, portents, dreams, faith in some
personal immortality, the sinfulness of sin,” a glimpse of
order in the universe and the image of some great director of
this order — such thoughts and emotions, aroused in more
sensitive minds, induced reformers ” to set up a sharp
opposition between the material and a spiritual world, between
the good of the body and that of the soul. The habit of
dwelling upon higher powers of nature, conceived as deities,
and the power of the human mind or spirit to influence or
control the body, led earnest prophets in all ages to favour a
valuation of life and character in which things of the body
should be subordinate to things of the spirit. The ascetic
life plays so important a part in our later religious movements
that its persistent recurrence in human history deserves
special note. Whenever a religion got to be a dominant
factor in a growing civilisation, it became, as we have seen,
entangled with concerns of Mammon, and worldly power and
riches began to subjugate the more spiritual or intellectual
aspects of its creed. Some priest, or saint, or prophet, might
then arise, with personality and prestige suf&cient to lead a
spiritual revolt, and to produce a reformation or a new faith.
Such protests were raised by Isaiah, Ezekiel, and other
prophets against the formalism and materialism into which
Judaism had fallen. In substance such revolts were an
invitation to renounce Mammon, and to concentrate upon
the worship of a mystic divinity, to give up the sacrifices
which could be of no value to a spiritual being, and to substi-
tute a devout obedience to his moral laws.

In Hebraism these recurrent revolts against worldliness

9

10 CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMIC LIFE

were the more significant because of the special claim of
Jehovah-worship to be a purely spiritual religion, both in
its ritual and in the benefits accruing to its worshippers. It
is clear that Christianity in its beginning was one of these
revolts, an attempt to clean up the professionalism and the
commercialism which had seized the seat of worship at
Jerusalem. The action, imputed to Jesus, of expelling the
money-changers from the precincts of the Temple, gives a
dramatic expression to the encroachment of Mammon upon
the spirituality of the Hebrew religion. The main tenor of
the Gospel teaching is a plea for a return to a way of living
which should keep under the body and its claims, and con-
centrate men’s thoughts and activities upon a holy life. All
the characteristic qualities of the Jew as business man, his
skilful profiteering as trader and money-lender, his steady
pursuit of gain by careful planning, hard bargaining, and
usurious loans, were subjects of repeated condemnation. To
despise riches, to take no thought for the morrow, to give to
all who ask, seeking nothing in return, and to find perfection
in selling all you have and giving to the poor — such precepts
were an express repudiation of all partnership with Mammon.

It is no doubt true that Jesus confronted a state of society
in which commercialism and industrialism were in their
infancy, a peasant and small-town community where the
economic problems which confront us did not arise. But,
because Jesus had little to say about trade morals, it by no
means follows that professing Christians of later times are
justified in holding that his express teaching upon the duty
of a man towards his neighbour in the simple society of his
time can be set aside as irrelevant to the consideration of the
business ethics of our time. “ It is far wiser,” writes a modern
critic,^ “ to recognize frankly the fact that just as Jesus’
teaching is non-political, so it is in any strict sense non-
economic.” Such a judgment destroys the unity of the moral
life. The effect of accepting it would be to confine the teaching
of the founder of Christianity to considerations of a private
personality which has no existence.

In the earliest Christian communities a virtual communism
prevailed, though the precise nature of the community of
property is a subject of controversy. “ A more careful
examination of the passages in the Acts,” writes Dr. Carlyle, ^
“ shows clearly enough that this was no systematic division
of property, but that the charitable instinct of the infant

^ ShaUer Matthew, Jesus on Social Institutions.

• Quoted by O’Brien, Medieval Economic Teaching^ p. 44.

CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMIC LIFE 11

Church was so great that those who were in want were com-
pletely supported by those who were more prosperous. . . .
Still there was no systematic communism, no theory of the
necessity of it.*' While there are passages in the writings of
the early Fathers which seem to point otherwise, such as
TertuUian's statement : ‘‘ One in mind and soul, we do not
hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another. All
things are common among us but our wives " — ^it is pretty
clear that private ownership was not discarded, even in the
period when the early expectation of Christ's second coming
would make the brief possession of earthly goods a matter
of slight importance. As time went on, the attitude of the
Church towards property became a matter of casuistry, resting
on a basic distinction between divine and human right. Here
is St. Augustine : “ By what right does every man possess
what he possesses ? Is it not by human right ? For by divine
right ‘ the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof.' The
poor and the rich God made of one clay : the same earth
supports alike the poor and the rich. By human right, how-
ever, one says, ‘ This estate is mine.' By human right, there-
fore, is by right of the Emperor. Why so ? Because God has
distributed to mankind these very human rights, through the
emperors and kings of the world."

A singular bit of sophistry, which recognizes Roman
emperors as the instruments of God, and in efiFect abolishes
the distinction between divine and human right ! But no
doubt it expresses the renewed desire of the established Church
to come to terms with Mammon. We soon begin to enter
upon the special line of defence of property characteristic of
the Church up to the present day, and well expressed by
Hilary of Pocitina; ^ “To possess riches is not wrongful, but
rather the manner in which possession is used " — not the
manner in which possession is obtained !

Liberalitas, always recognized as a virtue that redeems
ownership, does not, however, consist merely in distributing
to others. For we are told that “ a wise and prudent saving
of money for investment would be considered a course of
conduct within the meaning of the term Uberalitas^ especially
if the enterprise in which the money were invested were one
which would benefit the community as a whole." ^

But the chief interest of a study of the economics of the
Roman Church as it gained control of Western Europe lies in
the conflict between its ethical principles as enumerated by
Aquinas and other leading schoolmen and the business practices
^ Quoted by O’Brien, p. 60. • Idem, p. 73.

12 CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMIC LIFE

which it was induced to sanction and to follow. “ The most
fundamental difference between medieval and modemeconomic
thought,’* writes Mr. Tawney,^ “ consists, indeed, in the fact
that, whereas the latter normally refers to economic expediency,
however it may be interpreted, for the justification of any
particular action, policy, or system of organization, the former
starts from the position that there is a moral authority to which
considerations of economic expediency must be subordinated.
The practical application of this conception is the attempt to
try every transaction by a rule of right which is largely, though
not wholly, independent of the fortuitous combinations of
economic circumstances.”

The “ just price ” which is the basic expression of this
“ rule of right ” is soon discovered to be little more than a
pious aspiration, inapplicable to any actual market. What
was the criterion of justice ? The schoolmen of the fourteenth
century soon found themselves enmeshed in the controversy
which divided our nineteenth-century economists, as to whether
the cost of the producer or the utility of the consumer was the
true source of value. Some of them reached the futile judg-
ment that a “ fair price ” was reached under freedom of
contract, a view which only transferred the difficulty from a
definition of justice ” to a definition of “ freedom.” Their
analysis soon led them to allow for varying circumstances
of scarcity, and we learn that St. Antonino, writing in the
fifteenth century, when commerce was already highly devel-
oped, came to the conclusion that “ the fairness of a price
could at best be a matter only of ‘probability and conjecture,’
since it would vary with places, periods, and persons.” ^ A
very reasonable conclusion, but one that reduces to nullity
the principle it professes to expound.

But however faulty the theory of the “ just price,” it is
probable that the early influence of Canon Law in endeavouring
to apply it was of considerable service in checking gross abuses
of economic force. For free and equal markets were rare, the
monopoly of local guilds everywhere confronting the consumer.

This same economic situation helps to explain the immense
attention paid to the principle and practice of “ usury.”
Though capitalism in overseas trade and in a few developing
industries was beginning to make progress and to use co-opera-
tive capital, most borrowing and lending of money had
relation to the personal needs and misfortunes of the borrower,
when in bargaining with lenders he was at a grave disadvantage.
For in small local communities his plight was known to the
^ Religion and the Rise of Capitaliam, p. 40. * Idem, p. 40.

CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMIC LIFE 13

lender, and could be converted into an instrument of extortion,
as stiU continues to be the case in primitive societies.

“ Usury,” as condemned by the medieval Church, did not
signify, as now, an excessive rate of interest on a loan. All
interest, regarded as a fixed payment stipulated in advance
for the loan of money, was usury. In an age when there was
little or no scope for the employment of money in ordinary
business, and when any surplus income was therefore con-
ceived as lying idle in its owner’s stocking or strong-box, it
did not seem unreasonable to expect that a neighbour’s
temporary need should be met by lending without interest
such otherwise idle money. If the lender had full security for
getting it back when he needed it, that sufiSced. And from
the earliest times compensation was allowed against such
failure to repay. There were other special qualifications of the
main principle. Any gain which the lender may forgo, or any
loss he may incur, as the result of his lending, he may recover
in payment. If the loan be to a landowner, he may take a
share of the produce of the soil, for this is in part, at any rate,
nature’s work. But he has no claim to any gain which the
borrower may make out of his own labour assisted by the loan,
for this product proceeds from the labour alone — ^not a very
reasonable view, but one which seemed to fit the simple
economic situation of the time.

It is hardly necessary to add that the condemnation of
money-lending (even with the qualifications I have specified)
did not apply to large financial operations conducted by the
rich and great. Kings and feudal nobles borrowed for their
war needs and their extravagances from the international
money market long organized in Italy, Germany, and later in
Holland. The Church itself, in the person of the Pope,
regularly employed these finance-houses for lending or for
borrowing, and even used threats of excommunication as a
means of enforcing interest payments. Protests were made
from time to time by moralists against such discrimination,
but in vain. For, as capitalism developed in the later Middle
Ages, the common sense of most Catholic communities recog-
nized that the strict enforcement of such principles would
hamper business and was opposed to the interests alike of
borrower and lender.

For our purpose it remains significant that ecclesiastical
law, as expressed in the Canons of the Church, continued, even
after the Reformation, to claim and exercise jurisdiction over
certain orders of cases of money-lending in this country.

Summarising the claim of the Church in medieval times to

14 CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMIC LIFE

have exerted a humanizing influence over economic life, we
may in general agree with Mr. Tawney’s contention that “ in
the earlier Middle Ages it had stood for the protection of
peaceful labour, for the care of the poor, the unfortunate, and
the oppressed — ^for the ideal, at least, of social solidarity
against the naked force of violence and oppression.” ^ But,
as he himself admits, the Church not only recognized, but
enforced serfdom, while ecclesiastical landlords were neither
better nor worse than others in their treatment of their serfs.
Nor was the care of the poor exercised in any efficiently
organized system of charity. The fact is that the Church came
easily to acquiesce in all the major inequalities, injustices, and
oppressions of the economic system, when the beneflciaries of
such system were the rich, the great, the powerful, or itself.
Indeed, the Church did not merely acquiesce in serfdom as
practised under the custom of most feudal societies. It
expressly endorsed and upheld the ownership of man by man,
slavery, as a legitimate form of property. The Catholic
Encyclopedia thus expresses itself on the subject :

“ Christian teachers, following the example of St. Paul,
implicitly accept slavery as not in itself incompatible with the
Christian law. The Apostle counsels slaves to obey their
masters and to bear with their conditions patiently. This
estimate of slavery continued to prevail until it became fixed
in the systematized ethical teaching of the schools ; and so it
remained without any conspicuous alteration until the end
of the eighteenth century.” ^

Indeed, a moral justification for slavery was provided by
St. Augustine, who held that “ it was one of the penalties
incurred by man as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve.”
Nay, further, we learn from St. Chrysostom that “ slavery
was declared to be a blessing because, like poverty, it afforded
the opportunity of practising the virtues of humility and
patience.” ^

So much for the Church’s “ care of the poor, the unfortunate,
and the oppressed.”

It is evident that the Christianity of the Church never
seriously attempted to apply the plain principles of the
teaching of the Gospels to the economic life of the peoples.
If they had taken the line that such secular activities lay
outside their province, and that religion was entirely concerned
with the spiritual preparation for another life, the truckling

^ Religion and the Rise of Capitalism^ p. 63.

* Article “ Slavery in Catholic Encyclopedia,

* Cf. O’Brien, op, cit. p. 92.

CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMIC LIFE 15

to Mammon might have been avoided. But taking, as it did,
the whole area of economic conduct under the diocese of its
spiritual authority, its actual policy must be deemed one of
continual concessions to the lust of power and greed of gain
which assumed increased rule over economic life as the simpler
orders of primitive industry yielded to the complexity of
modem methods of production and of markets, and to the
displacement of custom and status by the greed and conflict
of competitive enterprise.

This judgment, however, may reasonably be contested by
those who take a more objective view of economic progress.
A serious attempt to apply the principle of “ the just price ”
and a condemnation of “ usury ” would assuredly have
crippled the adventure in competitive industry and the
widening of markets that were essential to the increase of
wealth and the rising standard of life in the later Middle Ages.
If some of the attendant evils of unbridled avarice might have
been checked, it would have been by maintaining an unen-
lightened repression of the new economic forces whose free
expression made for the general gain of the community in
the long run.

4c ♦ ♦

The Catholic Church might, however, have won more
sympathy for its efforts to maintain its spiritual control over
the economic world if it had kept its own hands clean from
the sin of avarice which it so harshly condemned in others.
But a study of the doctrines and practices employed by the
Church bring to light what we may call an esoteric economic
system, by means of which it fastened suckers into the minds
of its adherents, so as to extract from them an increasing share
of any wealth they might acquire.

The most potent instrument in this economic system was
the doctrine of Purgatory. The belief in a post-mortem
period of spiritual cleansing is by no means a peculiar invention
of Christianity. It may, indeed, be claimed as a humane
provision for a spiritual eternal life, though painful in its actual
incidence ; for, according to the best authorities, souls during
their sojourn in Purgatory were tormented by material fire.
But the points in the doctrine that are of focal interest for
our enquiry are two : First, a limited period of time is set upon
the suffering ; secondly, this period may be shortened or even
cancelled by certain interventions of the Church, induced by
acts of piety on the part of believers.

Now it is easy to recognize what a powerful instrument was
thus placed at the disposal of the Church. A spiritual power

16

CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMIC LIFE

in the first instance, but easily convertible into an economic
power. There is no ground for holding that in its original
discovery of Purgatory the Church realized the economic
potency of this doctrine, or saw in it the source of wealth
which it became. It was in all probability the sense of power,
rather than of wealth, which first led to the development of
the doctrine. If Purgatory had remained a fixity in the
divine plan, there would have been nothing in it for the Church.
But it is evident from the very weakness of the scriptural basis
of the doctrine that the Church early recognized its practical
potency. Its main reliance was upon a passage in the gospel
of Matthew ^ stating that “ whosoever speaketh against the
Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world,
neither in the world to come.” This, St. Augustine argued,
signifies that the statement that “ some sinners are not forgiven
either in this world or the next, would not be truly said unless
there were other (sinners) who, though not forgiven in this
world, are forgiven in the next.” ^

But God will not be moved to remission of any penalty
by the merits of the deceased or by pity for his suffering !
Motives must be applied from outside. What motives ?
Augustine says “the prayers and alms of the faithful, the
Holy Sacrifice of the Altar, aid the faithful departed and move
the Lord to deal with them in mercy and kindness, and this is
the practice of the universal Church handed down by the
Fathers.”

Now from earliest times Prayers for the Dead were
closely linked up with Purgatory. But this private piety
of the friends and relatives of the deceased would be found
far less potent than the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar, the per-
formance of the Mass. The superior efficacy of this act was
early recognized in the leaving of sums of money by d3dng
persons for the purpose, or by contributions from attendants
at the celebrations thus induced. Protests were made from
time to time by churchmen scandalized by the venality of
such conduct. “ What, pray, is the cause why the other
church services remain in the simplicity and purity of their
first institution, and this alone (of the Mass) is doubled contrary
to its first institution ? Certainly the cause is in the offerings :
for at the Mass we offer and at no other service.” ® From such

^ Ch. xiii v. 32.

* A still feebler support to Piu*gatory is found in 1 Corinthians
iii. 16.

* Petrus Cantor, cited G. G. Coulton, Life of ike Middle Ages, Vol. I,
p. 36.

17

CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMIC LIFE

offerings we learn “ altars are erected, sanctuaries are adorned,
and monasteries built.” “ Some again have invented a Mass
for the slaughter of those lately slain round about Jerusalem,
as of newly -made martyrs, by which Mass they think to
entice to themselves the greater oblations by reason of the
favour that men bear to such men slain (in the Crusades).”

The struggle of the puritan spirit against the encroach-
ment of Mammon in the monastic life is well expressed by
St. Bernard’s rebuke to his fellow-Cistercians : “I marvel
how monks could grow accustomed to such intemperance in
eating and drinking, clothing and bedding, riding abroad
and building, that, wheresoever those things are wrought
most busily and with most pleasure and expense, there
Religion is thought to be best kept.” ^

Each successive monastic order — ^Benedictine, Cluniac,
Cistercian, Carthusian, Franciscan, Dominican — ^began with
genuine professions of “ poverty ” and developed into an
instrument for extracting wealth, which they applied, partly
to fineries of architecture, partly to comfortable and
luxurious living. How could it be otherwise with such a
potent instrument as Purgatory in their possession? To
capitalize the fear of Purgatory seems a business policy which
was natural and inevitable. Hell could not be profitably
handled, for its pains were infinite, and a market needs the
quality of scarcity. The limitation of Purgatory lent itself
to an instalment system of selling exemptions from torment.
Consider how great must have been the potency of this instru-
ment when a baron on his death-bed was attended by a church-
man able to reduce his approaching period of post-mortem
agony by a thousand years, or even to cancel it, provided he
would put his cross (he could not read or write !) to a prepared
document conveying a large part of his estates to Holy Church,
in the shape of the adjoining monastery or chantry.

But Purgatory was not the only instrument for extracting
wealth from the faithful and the fearful. Selling the right
to sin was another lucrative method. This went by the names
of Indulgence and Pardon. In the ofi&cial catechism of the
Roman Church indulgence is defined as “ the remission of the
temporal punishment which often remains due to sin after
its guilt has been forgiven.” Such remission may be plenary
or partial, according to the terms of the indulgence. In form
it was a remission of private penances for sin granted by the
Pope. In practice it was a retail purchase of the right to sin,
a comparatively late development of spiritual economics.

^ G. G. Coulton, op. cit., Vol. IV, p, 139.

18 CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMIC LIFE

The first plenary indulgence was granted by Pope Urban II
for the first Crusade, a very suitable occasion, for a good deal
of hard sinning was associated with that historical episode.
By the thirteenth century we learn that indulgences were in
pretty general practice by all Churches, and lasted up to the
later part of the sixteenth century. They brought into
operation a profession of Pardoners, or collectors, who dealt
with the matter on a sound business basis, though competition
seems to have impaired the earlier monopoly- values. Piers
Plowman spoke of pardoners who “ give pardon for pence
pound-meal about ” — i.e., wholesale, and Pope Boniface IX
complained of Pardoners “ absolving even impenitent sinners
for ridiculously small sums.” In 1450 Thomas Gascoigne,
Chancellor of Oxford University, wrote : ‘‘ Sinners say

nowadays ‘ I care not how many or how great sins I commit
before God, for I shall easily and quickly get plenary remission
of any guilt and penalty whatever by absolution and indul-
gence granted to me from the Pope, whose writing and grant
I have bought for 4c?. or 6c?. — or for a game of tennis.’ ”

The use of indulgences, though primarily designed as a
release from penance due for sins committed by the living,
came to be extended to the case of souls in Purgatory. For
we learn that ‘‘ St. Thomas holds that indulgences avail
principally for the person who performs the work for which
the indulgence is given, but secondarily may avail even for
the dead, if the form in which the indulgence is granted be so
worded as to be capable of such interpretation,” and he
adds : '' Nor is there any reason why the Church may not
dispose of its treasure of merits in favour of the dead, as it
surely dispenses it in favour of the living.” ^

The abuses of this power to sell the right to sin eventually
became so flagrant that the Council of Trent in 1562 abolished
the oflSce of Pardoner. Other aspects of the business life of
the Church are the uses of Saints for purposes of pilgrimages,
the sale of relics, and the performance of miraculous cures.
The most notorious example of this trade is found in the
multiplication of pieces of the Cross. But probably by far
the largest profit was obtained by coining the miraculous
virtues of local Saints and Virgins and by selling objects which
bore the virtues of contiguous magic.

That the better-conducted monasteries were seats of learning
and homes of literary, artistic, and even scientific culture in
a world of ignorance and gross materialism may well be
conceded. It is often claimed that their sanctity enabled
^ Catholic Encyclopedia^ Vol. XII, p. 679.

CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMIC LIFE 19

the fine arts of life to survive during “ the dark ages.” But
there is another side to this picture. For, if monasteries and
nunneries attracted to themselves men and women of superior
mental and moral refinement, their celibate life must be held
responsible for a survival of the intellectually and morally
unfit, and a loss to humanity of the stock which bore the
promise of progress in individual ability and character. Such
withdrawal from the world of so large a number of the finer-
natured men and women must upon the whole be accounted
among the gravest injuries inflicted by religion upon the
progress of humanity.

Taking account, however, of the distinctively economic
arts, the monasteries both here and on the continent are
entitled to some credit for improvements in agriculture,
building, weaving, and in other handicrafts withdrawn from
the conservatism of the guilds. Even medicine and book-
keeping seem to have owed much of their early cultivation
to monastic life. But upon the whole the money-making
proclivity of the organized Churches must be deemed to be as
detrimental to the evolution of progressive industry as the
ascetic spirit which inspired the early anchorites, and to which
reformers within the Church from time to time reverted.
These reversions were nearly always short-lived, for the plain
reason that they affected to ignore some of the most potent
and paramount of human instincts — ^the craving for power
and for wealth as an instrument of power and luxury. The
development of Christian doctrines and the ritual of the
Roman Church moved, as we have seen, unerringly upon the
lines of an economy of power, and the skilful use of doctrine
for enlarging the material resources of the Church grew into
a fine art of practical psychology.

Neither in England nor in continental countries do any
closely reliable measures of the acquired wealth of the Church
exist. But all authorities agree that towards the close of the
Middle Ages a very large proportion of the land- values was
concentrated in its hands, at a time when agriculture was in
every country the dominant factor in the economic system.
Hallam, writing of the close of the period, says : ^ “ The
enormous and in a large measure ill-gotten opulence of the
regular clergy had long since excited jealousy in every part
of Europe.” “ A larger proportion of landed wealth was
constantly accumulating in hands which lost nothing that they
had grasped.” Most estimates incline to the view that in
this country one-fifth of the occupied land belonged to the
1 History of the Middle Ages, Vol. I, p. 69.

20 CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMIC LIFE

Church, and in Germany, France, Italy, and other good
Catholic countries the proportion was probably at least as
large. There can be no more convincing testimony to the
inroad of Mammon-worship into the Church than the con-
stantly increasing share of property which passed into her
hands.

Modern social thinkers, in revolt against the laissez-faire
competitive individualism of nineteenth -century economic
theory and practice, are sometimes prone to refer with favour
to the principles which underlay the claims of the medieval
Church to regulate industry and commerce in accordance with
the organic theory of a sound society. This theory, pre-
scribing equitable rules for economic conduct, subordinating
the production of wealth to its vital uses, and regarding the
well-being of the community as the paramount consideration
in economic activities, can make a specious claim to the
sympathy of those who have a keen perception of the disorders
of our current economic system.

The theory, indeed, I hold to be essentially sound. Dis-
tinctively economic conduct cannot properly be divorced
from other lines of conduct, either in individuals or in societies,
and should be subject to rational direction applied in the
interests of human beings and societies conceived as organic
wholes. Such rules, moreover, in order to be applied effec-
tively, should have conscious recognition. The notion that
some “ invisible hand ” or instinctive harmony can take the
place of the rational will in regulating any branch of human
conduct is a noxious fallacy, the falsehood and folly of which
were never more manifest than at the present time. It is,
then, fair to recognize that, so far as this central conscious
organic purpose underlay the claim of the Catholic Church to
regulate economic life, it held a sounder view than that which
later on prevailed in modern economic theory and policy.
But when we turn from the theory of the Church to its practice,
we see how easily incompetence, cowardice, and avarice
combined to sterilize its high professions. The moral control
claimed by the Church over economic conduct, and embodied
in the principle of “ justum pretium,'' or fair dealing, was
everywhere subjected to compromise and concessions which
ate away its ethics, and made it servile to the interests of the
richer members of the community. It did little at any time
to curb the greed and rapacity of the strong. Partly by
reason of the vague idealism of its principles, which rendered
them inapplicable in their simplicity to the complex affairs of
business life, but largely from an insufficient faith in their

CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMIC LIFE 21

application, the Church failed of fulfilment. Thus Mammon,
carrying on a constant guerilla warfare against the spiritual
rule, reduced its supremacy to impotence. But still more
signal was Mammon’s victory within the bosom of the Church
itself, inspiring it to the discovery and cultivation of doctrines
and rites which became ever finer instruments for the acquisi-
tion of wealth, and for the subordination of spiritual to worldly
goods.

Chapter III

Protestantism and Business

sixteenth century was an age of new and stirring
I adventure in many fields of human activity. The
mariner’s compass had given a freedom of the seas to adven-
turous traders. The discovery of the Cape route to India
and of the American continent had destroyed the trading
and maritime supremacy of the Italian cities. First Spain
and Portugal, later England and Holland, established com-
mercial relations along the African and American coasts and
with the islands of the Pacific. Europe, hitherto stinted in
the precious metals, which fiowed to the East in payment for
spices and other Eastern luxuries, was now nourished financially
with gold and silver from the American mines. Spanish
treasure-ships bearing the plunder of Mexico and Peru became
the prey of British or Dutch pirates, much as the rum-runners
and bootleggers in America to-day are prey of the highjackers
and the racketeers.

This new flow of the precious metals played into the hands
of early capitalism, both on its financial and industrial sides.
It brought the development of a money-market, with the
financing not only of great foreign trading companies, but also
of new mining and textile trades. In England the ruin of the
old feudal aristocracy in the Wars of the Roses and the passage
of the Church lands into the hands of new business men were
transforming the old routine of feudal custom, and indus-
trializing large sections of rural England. These distinctively
economic changes coincided with the great new revival and
expansion of learning, literary, artistic, scientific, known as
the Renaissance. The flood of fresh thought and speculation
which burst first in Italy, and then flowed north and west,
was not merely a revelation of the art and literature of Hellas.
It was a new free stir in the mind of educated man throughout
Europe, exhibiting itself in scepticism and revolt against

22

PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS 23

dogmas and accepted standards, religious, scientific, political,
and ethical. The mingled rationalism and imaginative enter-
prise of this spiritual revival come home best to us in the
literature and the adventure of the Elizabethan days. It
was a sense of liberty in the world of thought and matter, on
every plane of activity; new worlds to conquer and the
stirring of a free spirit for the task of conquest.

The urges of this new economic and intellectual life were
bound to come into conflict with the conservatism and the
vested interests, material and moral, of the Catholic Church.
The tide of new learning, sweeping through the Universities
of Europe from Italy and reaching England first through
scholars like Grocyn and Linacre, afterwards raised to the
level of enthusiasm by the Dutch visitor Erasmus and his
disciples More and Colet, was not with any clear intent an
attack upon orthodox religion. But none the less it carried
the seeds of a Protestant revolt. A definite anti-clericalism
already lay slumbering in the growing resentment against the
powers, privileges, and possessions of the Church, before any
plain doctrinal divergences were manifested. The com-
bination of a revived Lollardry and Bible-reading and the
new learning among the growing lay educated class un-
doubtedly helped Henry VIII in his substitution of clerical
nationalism for the rule of Rome. The printing press was
the most revolutionary weapon ever placed in the hands
of man. It enabled him to test the authority of the
Church and to put his own judgment on the evidences of his
faith.

This brief survey of leading influences and events may help
us in considering how far economic forces produced or moulded
Protestantism and its Puritan distillation. The Roman
Church, as a Catholic institution autocratically overriding the
new institution of the national state, claiming both spiritual
and temporal supremacy, and a supremacy enforced by
innumerable economic suckers, aroused deep hostility among
the self-respecting burghers of the growing cities of Germany,
Holland, and England. Not the doctrines or the rites of the
Church, but the exactions and restrictions it imposed were
the roots of this discontent. In this sense and to this extent
the causes of Protestantism may be said to have been economic.
The central and local parasitism by which a large proportion
of the product of the industry of the people passed to the
support of local monasteries, chantries, and churches, and
through them, or directly, to swell the papal treasury, was
felt as a growing grievance even among the religious-minded

24 PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

laity. The new nationalism of the Tudors, with their cen-
traj^ed state government, intensified these usurpations of
a foreign master, and greatly aided Henry in his schemes of
monarchical aggrandisement. In one quite definite way the
plunder of the monasteries and abbeys helped the cause of
Protestantism. “ That unhallowed booty,” writes Disraeli,
“ created a factitious aristocracy, ever fearful lest they might
be called upon to disgorge their sacrilegious spoil. To prevent
this they took refuge in political religionism, and paltering
with the disturbed consciences or the pious fantasies of a
portion of the people, organised them into religious sects.
These became the unconscious Pretorians of their ill-gotten
domains. At the head of these religionists, they have con-
tinued ever since to govern, or powerfully to influence, this
country.” ^

Though there is an element of fantastic exaggeration in
this imputation of continuous Whig politics to the new Tudor
gentry, the dispersion of Church lands undoubtedly helped
to build up a solid country block which co-operated with the
new bourgeoisie against every attempt to restore Catholicism
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of the
purchasers of the Church lands probably remained faithful
adherents of the Church of England, but a not inconsiderable
number of their descendants in the Stuart days were found
among the Independents and other sectaries that furnished
Grom well’s armies with men and funds.

It would also be true to say that in England, as also in the
continental countries subject to the new commercial and
financial influences and opportunities, the constant drainage
of wealth passing to the Roman Church was felt as a grave
impediment to economic progress. Moreover, the diversion
of this wealth from the care of the poor and other charitable
uses to the support of idle, luxurious, and evil-living monks
and clerics was a growing scandal in all Catholic countries, and
especially in Rome itself, where it was associated with a
widespread disbelief in the basic doctrines of Christianity and
the reduction of religion to a profitable formalism.

It is no wonder that pious pilgrims to Rome from other
Catholic lands were shocked by what they saw and heard, and
that their reports on their return helped to feed the anti-
clericalism of countries like Germany, the Netherlands,
Scandinavia, and Britain. Genuine moral disapproval thus
came to be blended with economic discontents. ‘‘ Loose
from Rome ” meant a sounder religion, national or local in its
^ Coningaby, Bk. II, ch. 1.

PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS 26

o^anization, and with full control of its own resources and
offices.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Protestant churches, however, were not in their first
intent disposed to relax any of the spiritual authority exercised
by organized religion over the moral and economic conduct of
their members. It is not true to represent the new sectarian
teaching of Lutherans, Calvinists, Independents, as the sub-
stitution of the authority of the Book for that of the Church,
and of the private judgment of the individual for priestly
authority. Though the Bible, now translated, was made
accessible to the minority who were capable of reading, the
authority of the reformed Church of England was never based,
and is not now based, upon the authority of the Bible, but
upon the continuous inspiration of the Church : the right of
private judgment is in all matters of faith and doctrine subject
to the authority of that Church. Nor was there in this matter
any substantial difference in the attitude of the Protestant
churches. Their founders and early spiritual leaders claimed
for their several Churches an authority of doctrinal inter-
pretation and of moral regimen as real as, and in the case of
Calvinism more rigorous than, that exercised by the Roman
Church.

Luther’s intention and personal influence were not directed
to release the economic or business conduct of men from the
rule of spiritual life exercised by the Christian community.
His earlier attitude during his reforming activities was a
disparagement of material gain, an indifference towards the
economic life. ‘‘ The pursuit of material gain beyond personal
needs must thus appear as a symptom of lack of grace, and
since it can apparently only be attained at the expense of
others, directly reprehensible.” ^ His later views led him to
value more highly the work of the world. It was the familiar
attitude of spiritual conservatives. Divine Providence had
placed men in their proper “ calling,” and it was their duty to
adapt themselves to this appointed “ station in life.” The
early Lutheran Church, thus inspired, cannot be regarded as
friendly to capitalism. Luther’s own repudiation of usury,
or indeed interest of any kind, involves a definitely reactionary
attitude towards the rising commercial and financial capitalism
of his time.

Mr. Tawney makes the following interesting comments upon
the position taken, not only by the Lutherans, but also by
other important Protestant sects ; “If it is true that the
1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 84.

26 PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

Reformation released forces which were to act as a solvent
of the traditional attitude of religious thought to social and
economic issues, it did so without design, and against the
intention of most reformers.” “ In the sixteenth century
religious teachers of all shades of opinion still searched the
Bible, the Fathers, and the corpus juris cauonici for light on
practical questions of social morality, and as far as the first
generation of reformers was concerned, there was no intention,
among either Lutherans, or Calvinists, or Anglicans, of
relaxing the rules of good conduct which were supposed to
control economic transactions and social relations. If any-
thing, their tendency was to interpret them with a more
rigorous severity, as a protest against the moral laxity of the
Renaissance, and in particular, against the avarice which was
thought to be peculiarly the sin of Rome.” ^

Thus, in estimating the influence of Protestantism upon
economic theory and conduct, we must distinguish the in-
tention of the Reformers from what may be termed the
natural consequences of their reforms, and the precepts of
the early enthusiasts of reform from the practices of the
succeeding generations of their adherents. The early reformers
did not abandon the idea of a Church-civilization in which all
departments of individual and social conduct should be
regulated in acordance with the law of God, as interpreted and
administered by the Church.

The severance of “ business ” from the moral control of
the Christian community, and the adoption of a laissez-faire
individualism had no plaee whatever in early Protestantism.
How the severance was actually etchieved, how the Protestant
virtues and valuations became the nutriment of capitalistic
energy and enterprise, is best studied in Calvinism and the
sects which its teaching inspired.

Calvinism was characterized by its spiritual isolationism.
A man’s communication with his God was not through the
organization of his Church, important as that was to his
religious life, but a directly personal one. And yet, as number-
less records indicate. Church discipline was remorselessly
imposed upon every branch of personal and social conduct.
Calvinism, alike in the country of its origin, Switzerland, and
in those of its early penetration, Holland, Scotland, France,
England, and later America, was brought into close contact
with the changes of a bustling urban life. Luther’s economic
attitude remained that of a countryman. But Geneva,
Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, and Edinburgh were filled
^ Religion and the Rise of CapitaUsm, pp. 84-6.

PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS 27

with men occupied with industry, commerce, and finance.
Did Calvinism take hold in these countries because of the
more independent and self-reliant stock that were born in or
gravitated to these centres of progressive business ? Was it
the religion that suited this type of men in this economic
environment, a process of natural selection ? Or did the
Calvinist faith, with its unflinching logic, its lack of emotional-
ism, its severe rules of personal ethics, supply the forces and
conditions of success in the new competitive system that was
everywhere beginning to displace the narrowly ordered
customary processes of guild life ? Mr. Tawney goes so far as
to assert that “it is perhaps the first systematic body of
religious teaching which can be said to recognize and applaud
the economic virtues.” ^

A society of hard, thoughtful, industrious men and women,
bent upon their personal salvation, to be achieved, under
Divine predestination, by conduct conducive to the glory of
God, was easily led to regard its occupations and “ callings ”
as chief instruments in the spiritual life thus conceived. Every
business activity, not expressly sinful, was regarded by them
as conducive to the glory of God. The qualities that made
for business success in the new economic order were qualities
valued on their own account as contributory to a godly life,
and the regulations of their churches gave them the social
approval.

What, then, were these useful economic qualities ? Some
were positive — viz., industry, initiative and enterprise, honesty,
foresight, calculation. Others were negative, the ascetic vir-
tues of temperance and continence, the avoidance of pleasures
and amusements ; thrift and accumulation of capital. Now,
as we shall observe, this way of life was more or less common
to all Protestant sects, at any rate in their early stages. But
Calvinism was peculiarly adapted to their encouragement and
effective practice. It did not keep the mind concentrated
upon the next world to the neglect of this. It eschewed
“ enthusiasm,” a disturbing emotionalism hostile to sound
business enterprise and orderly work. Its doctrine of pre-
destination relieved the saint of the brooding anxiety of
spirit which was apt to sap the energy otherwise available for
money-making. Above all, disregarding the express teaching
of Christ about the dangers of riches, it regarded them with
favour as the natural fruit of business ingenuity and toil,
condemning only their misuse for self-indulgence and ostenta-
tion. Mammon, in fact, was taken into the service of God
^ Op, cit,, p. 106.

o

28 PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

as a junior partner. This crude way of putting it was not,
indeed, distinctly incorporated in the Calvinistic theology,
but it emerged in their practical ethics of life. “ God has
been very good to me,” was the naive comment of a modern
English business man of high political status when reflecting
on the wealth which successful practice of the economic virtues
placed at his disposal.

Rationalism may at first sight seem a curious term to apply
to Calvinism. And yet, given certain assumptions, it helps
greatly to explain the close pact between God and Mammon,
success in this world contributing to salvation in the next,
which marked not only strict Calvinism as it appeared in
Geneva and Scotland, but in different degrees all the leading
nonconformist bodies from the sixteenth century onward.

The doctrine of Predestination was a dogmatic background
of all the sects that came under the Calvinist influence. It
was not only the principle of Presbyterianism in Britain and
in North America. It was incorporated in the Independent
Savoy Declaration of 1658, the Baptist Confession of 1689,
and found a place in the early Wesleyan movement under the
teaching of its most important thinker Whitefield.^

The ascetic Protestantism of the Calvinist doctrine nourished
industrialism at the very time when it most required this
moral nutriment. For the growing organization of commerce
and finance, and the beginnings of machine production in the
manufactures, formed a large demand for capital, the fruit of
saving. Honest industry, accompanied by abstemious living,
necessarily bred a surplus income which could be used for the
enlargement and improvement of the business that furnished
it, or could be employed in some outside loan or investment.
Predestination might, indeed, have led to a fatalism that would
have atrophied business enterprise, had it been a subject for
emotional brooding, or it might have separated the elect from
the outside world and led to a monastic community life.
That these results did not occur is attributed by most students
of pietism to what they term “ the ethic of the calling,” the
realization of salvation within the everyday routine of this
life as a preparation for the next. But a consideration of the
typical mentality of the urban Swiss, Dutch, Scots, or Hugue-
nots will lead us to impute a large measure of economic
determinism in the application of their creed. The material
and social environment of these peoples, moulding their stock
and character, evoked a sturdy, self-reliant, energetic type
which needed to express itself in the activities of everyday life.

^ Weber, op, cit„ p. 126.

PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS 29

These peoples found in Calvinism a spiritual stiffening that was
highly serviceable to this daily conduct. Though t& religion
they adopted set no formal value upon worldly success and the
accumulation of worldly goods, by an easy “ rationalization ”
the wealth which was the natural fruit of industrious applica-
tion to “ a calling ” became a testimony to a good life. “ The
doctrine that inward salvation should be expressed in con-
tinuous labour merged with the belief that success was the
hall-mark of godliness.” ^ Insensibly the religious bourgeois
of this type accepted the current rules of honesty and legality
in a business world that had already broken away from the
shackles of scholasticism and its Canon Law. Capital and
credit, the guiding factors in modern business, were detached
from the obsolete conceptions of avarice and usury, and
competition between presumed equals was regarded as the
natural method of determining “ a fair price.” “ Capital and
credit are indispensable ; the financier is not a parasite, but
a useful member of society ; and lending at interest, provided
that the rate is reasonable, and that loans are made freely to
the poor, is not per se more extortionate than any other of the
economic transactions without which human affairs cannot
be carried on.” ^

Given this acceptance of a “ calling,” the adoption of
ordinary business-bargaining as the method of determining
a price, the distinction between business loans, or investment,
and “ usury,” and a long stride in the direction of laissez-faire
capitalism had been made. You were not to oppress your
workmen, or otherwise to “ grind the faces of the poor,” or to
take an unfair advantage in a market by “ engrossing,”
“ forestalling,” or other forms of monopoly. But wealth made
by honest industry, skill, and enterprise, was in a sense God’s
reward in this world, something “ added unto you.” If you
like, you can interpret all this as a compromise, imposed upon
the original pattern of Calvinism by the pressure of business
interests in the commercial centres where Calvinist doctrine
and disci]>line were first planted. The ordinary conduct of
life as practised by a Calvinist (or indeed by any of the ascetic
sects of Protestantism), enabled him to thrive and to accumu-
late this world’s goods. The abandonment of the old Church
canons for industry and commerce, now rendered obsolete in
all the advanced countries of Europe, led to a sharper dis-
tinction between the origins or modes of acquiring wealth

^ Margaret James, Social Problems and Poverty during the Puritan
Revolution, p. 18.

* Tawney, p. 108.

30 PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

and the uses made of acquired wealth. The continuous
tendency was towards a loosening of the restrictions of
business conduct even among “ the elect.” Church govern-
ment and its “ godly discipline ” in the reign of English
Puritanism came to concern itself less and less with the
modes of getting wealth, more and more with the modes
of spending and misspending it. The preacher before the
Lord Mayor and Aldermen in 1655 enunciates the doctrine
that “ Wisdom is good without an inheritance, but it cannot
doe so much good when it is seated in a poor man as when it is
joyned with an inheritance.” ^ Though Baxter and a few
other preachers and teachers sought to formulate rules of fair
trading in conformity with the old traditions, these were
regarded for the most part as obstructive to modern industry
and commerce. They were treated in the same way in which
the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount have always been
treated in the Western world. They were admired and even
recognized as noble ideals, but were disregarded in practice.

It must be remembered that up to this time very few men
in this country had ventured to question the principle and
rights of private property or the equitable distribution of
income. There had, indeed, been a scattering of Antinomians,
Anabaptists, and Millenarians, who, while differing in their
religious positions, agreed in teaching that the land should be
accessible to all, and that there should be a community of
goods. During the Puritan Revolution the extreme doctrine
of these sects influenced the agrarian movement led by Win-
stanley, and the brief-lived Digger agitation aimed at estab-
lishing a vague sort of social democracy under the Common-
wealth. “ At this very day,” says Winstanley, “ poor people
are forced to work for a miserable wage which is not sufficient
to provide them with bread, while those who dwell in idleness
enjoy the fulness of the earth.” “ But I tell you and your
Preachers Scripture which says the poor shall inherit the earth
is really and materially to be fulfilled.” 2

But the solid control of the Puritan Revolution lay in the
hands of the prosperous and powerful middle-class, who
desired nothing less ,than close scrutiny into origins of wealth
and the business relations of rich and poor. Oppressive land-
lords who enclose lands or evict tenants without consideration
of their vital interests are indeed condemned by “ the best
people,” but the idea of questioning the right of owning land
and of charging rents for its tenancy seldom entered the minds
of Christian moralists. As business grew up on a large scale,
^ Margaret James, p. 18. * Idem, p. 340.

PKOTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS 31

its profits and the interest on money invested in it were
accepted as equally natural with rent. In both cases legal
right should be qualified by consideration of hard cases.
Extortion was hostile to the sense of fair play (always the
basic principle of English morality) and was pilloried by
Bunyan as a sin “ most commonly committed by men of trade,
who without all conscience, when they have an advantage will
make a prey of their neighbour.’’

But, with the elaboration and expansion of markets for
goods and services, “ selling too dear ” or “ buying too cheap ”
became less and less possible of ascertainment. The law of
supply and demand ” acquired more and more a quasi-moral
validity as indicative of equal benefit to the two parties. The
Puritans attempted, indeed, in their earlier Church communi-
ties to lay down and to enforce discipline in the detailed con-
duct of a business life. But neither the temper of their
adherents nor the new commercial environment of their time
favoured such attempts. For “ Puritanism was strongest
among those classes who were best able to take care of them-
selves and had nothing to gain and all to lose by the inter-
ference of Church and State in economic affairs.” ^

II

The acquisitive and the possessive urges are in peaceful times
£he commonest and most persistent forms of that “ will to
power,” that sense of personal importance, which is the
subtlest and most multiform spirit in man. In many people
it is accompanied by an equally intense urge towards con-
spicuous expenditure and extravagant luxury. But in every
community there are orderly and timid souls, with no hanker-
ing after enjoyment or display. These find their satisfaction
in putting their earnings into a stocking, or, in less primitive
conditions, into a savings bank, or, when these savings are of
a large amount, investing them in gilt-edged securities. As
speculative enterprise offers great business opportunities, a
third form of economic spirit displays itself — ^the zest for the
activities and hazards of the business life itself, the lust for
power in its most modern form. It is this last that charac-
terizes modern capitalism and furnishes its controlling personal
influences. The spendthrift, the miser, the speculator, are
the extremes of these attitudes towards money. Perhaps in
fairness we should add a fourth, the generous public spirit

^ James, p. 16.

32 PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

which not infrequently emerges in a successful money-maker
and leads him to find his satisfaction in liberal expenditure on
educational, hygienic, or other public benefits. Indeed, there
is a modern tendency for the public to expect of a successful
business man large contributions to charitable causes. This
expectation easily fuses with a recognition that liberal dona-
tions act as a protective covering for high-handed and un-
scrupulous business methods. Religion still has a considerable
share in these benefactions, and the social ethics of the pulpit
are seldom devoted to close scrutiny of money-making pro-
cesses, or to denunciation of the deceitfulness of riches.

But, returning to our four-fold differentiation of monetary
conduct as a “ will to power,” the Puritan churches have
always condemned spendthrifts and luxurious living. Timid
thrift, the careful nursing of a nest-egg, is the conduct pre-
scribed for the industrious worker who is a church member.
Large capital for profitable business enterprise and the employ-
ment of industrious workers is regarded as an instrument of
grace. Public benefactions are the fruits of grace.

Thus, in their attitude towards both productive processes
and expenditure, the Puritan churches favoured the rise of a
prosperous bourgeoisie, the makers and owners of a con-
tinuously increasing proportion of the national wealth. Their
early restraints upon the conduct of business, soon found to
be incompatible with joint-stock capitalism in industry, trade,
and finance, tended to break down, while a competitive
laissez-faire system, based on individual rational utilitarianism,
received the tacit sanction and implied approval of the
churches. Though the first reformers were largely drawn
from the middle classes, either of the townsmen or the
peasantry, as time went on most members of the reformed
churches were manual workers, in large part hired labourers.
The religious appeal was not the same for them as for their
masters. Their lot or calling required obedience to (divinely
appointed !) masters, routine industry under proper discipline,
contentment with their wages and other conditions of work,
abstinence from drink and other dissipations and amusements.
In these different ways capitalism was aided by the ascetic
Puritanism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
traces of which remain to-day in the more serious remnants
of Protestantism.

PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

33

III

So far we have dwelt mainly upon the Calvinist creed and
temper, as manifested in the reformed churches, in their
bearing upon business and the economic side of human life.
But Calvinism had not a monopoly of economic discipline
and asceticism. Whether the salvation of the individual soul
was to be achieved by God’s arbitrary will, man’s faith, or his
good works, or by some curious blend of the three, a strict
discipline of life was usually enjoined upon each individual,
including strict rules of economic behaviour. Perhaps the
most thoroughgoing exponent of this discipline was Richard
Baxter in his Christian Directory y or a Summa of Practical
Theologie and Cases of Conscience. Here economic conduct is
treated as subordinate to the rules of Christian ethics. Whether
the law of the land permits or not, the Christian is bound by
the golden rule and a right regard for the public good in all
his business transactions.

The Christian “ must not only eschew the obvious extortions
practised by the monopolist, the engrosser, the organizer
of a corner or a combine. He must carry on his business in
the spirit of one who is conducting a public service ; he must
order it for the advantage of his neighbour as much as, and
if his neighbour be poor, more than his own.” So Mr. Tawney
expresses the spirit of Baxter’s teaching, and Bunyan, writing
a few years later his Life and Death of Mr. Badman, enunciates
the same principles. Within the fold of Protestantism arose
several such attempts to revert to what was held to be plain
gospel teaching and to urge its application to modern economic
conduct. The failure of these efforts of what may properly
be called Christian Socialism, alike in its business ethics and
its asceticism, is the most interesting exhibition of the power
of Mammon to win to his purposes the devotees of a saintly
life. The fuller exploration of this failure is, however, best
deferred until we have traced the same process of spiritual
struggle and collapse in other churches.

Wesleyanism, through the teaching of its founder, takes
higher ground as an economic doctrine than any of the earlier
Protestant sects. For though to it, as to them, the individual
life and character were the instruments of spiritual progress,
the moral perfectibility which was the centre of Wesley’s creed
was not limited merely, or perhaps mainly, to the end of
personal salvation in another world. The perfection of the

34 PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

individual was a basis for a system of social ethics.^ ‘‘ Above
all/’ the new enthusiasts were warned, do not make the care
of future things a pretence for neglecting present duty.” ^

The commendation of the industrial virtues by Wesley was
especially addressed to the workers who formed the main body
of his early followers. On the productive side of the economic
life they must be industrious, for “ without industry we are
neither fit for this life, nor for the world to come.” ^ On the
consuming side they were to live a life of seriousness and
abstinence.

“ We do not find any other body of people who abstain from
fetshionable diversions, from reading plays, romances, or books
of humour, from singing innocent songs, or talking in a merry,
gay, diverting manner ; 3^our plainness of dress ; your manner
of dealing in trade ; your exactness in observing the Lord’s
your scrupulosity as to things that have not paid
custom ; your total abstinence from spirituous liquors (unless
in cases of necessity).” ^

The relation between employer and employee was treated
by Wesley in terms of paternalism. Employers were in some
sense responsible for the bodies as well as the souls of those
placed under their charge. On the question of wages no
consistent policy is discernible. Wesley was not only in
favour of fair prices, but on one occasion commended mob ”
action to coerce forestallers ” who bought up corn to starve
the poor.® But evidently he had no principle whereby to
define either ‘‘ fair prices ” or “ fair wages,” and we find him
thus advising a member of his church : “To servants I would
give full as much as others give for the same service ; and not
more.” This, of course, accepts the dubious assumption that
the current wage is, in fact, fair and sufficient. But, generaUy
speaking, we are told, “ Wesley and his associates thought in
terms of personal responsibility, fair prices, and fair wages, in
a day when those conceptions were rapidly losing all of their
meaning.” ® So the theoretic view of a divinely sanctioned
calling, either for employer or worker, had no real relation
to the new capitalist industry.

As for the use of riches, Wesley took the line of “ steward-
ship ” and “ trust.” God’s purpose was to be the guide. “ As
to yourself,” wrote Wesley to a man of property, “ you are not
the proprietor of any thing; no, not of one shilling in the

^ W. J. Warner, The Wesleyan Movement^ p. 71.

* Wesley, Works, Vol. V, p. 390. * Warner, p. 141.

* Wesley, Works, Vol. VII, p. 123.

* Warner, p. 160. • Idem, p. 161.

35

PROTESTANTISM AND J BUSINESS

world. You are only the steward of what another entrusts
youwith,tobelaidout,not according to your will but his. . . .
Is not God the sole proprietor of all things ? ^ But who was

to interpret the terms of this stewardship ? Certain kinds of
expenditure were evidently right. You must first pay your
debts. One must “ owe no man anything.’’ Next, you must
provide for the necessities of your vocation. Men in business
are to lay up as much as necessary for the carrying on ” (and
expansion?) “ of that business.” Next comes the claims for
the “ reasonable wants ” of oneself and one’s dependents,
including such provision for one’s survivors “ as would keep
them above want.” If your business yields a surplus beyond
such provisions, it shall go “ to satisfy the needs of the com-
munity ” — i.e., to charity.

From the first it was recognized by the Wesley ans that a
moral and godly life would contribute to material success.
Thus it was an obvious deduction that such success should be
regarded as a mark of Divine approval. A natural corollary
of this view was that poverty was due to moral and religious
defects. But this moral individualism was a later product in
Wesleyanism. Wesley himself denounced it. ‘ ‘ That common
objection, they are poor only because they are idle is
wickedly, devilishly false.” ^ To him the central cause of
poverty lay in inequitable consumption, luxurious living for
the few, the denial of necessaries for the many. The due
provision of employment at reasonable pay for all was then
as now the economic crux. Wesley, no more than Church
Congresses of to-day, had a solution.

How far the individual is responsible for success or failure
in his “ calling,” whether as business man or worker, is a
question perhaps incapable of exact answer. That personal
qualities and activities are the direct determinants of how
much work a man does, and the quantity and quality of its
product, is indisputable. But that same product may vary
indefinitely, as to its value or market price, according to the
general state of trade — i.e., the quantity and quality of all
sorts of other goods which exchange against this product in
the processes of the market. Now one industrious man cannot
have any power to affect this ‘‘ demand ” for his product,
though the real wage he gets for it depends upon it. The
failure to recognize this fundamental truth that “ value,” and
therefore ‘‘ wages,” are for the most part socially and not
individually determined, is certain to obfuscate the minds of
all who concentrate upon the character and habits of individual
^ Warner, p. 166 . • Journal, Vol. IV, p. 62 .

36 PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

workers. The later Wesleyans, like other religionists, fell into
this error, though their founder had a clearer understanding
of the nature of poverty. This was, indeed, only to be expected.
For it soon came to pass that employers, not themselves
associated with Methodism, learned to recognize the advantage
of employing in posts of responsibility, as foremen and over-
lookers, sober, industrious members of the Methodist local
churches. These foremen in their turn would bring into the
works labourers whom they knew to be sober and industrious.
For the reformation of the most dissolute members of the
industrial towns and the mining villages by Methodism became
common knowledge. The early persecution and prejudice
against this “ canting sect ” and its “ revival ” methods gave
way before a growing recognition of these serviceable fruits,
so that in many quarters by no means friendly to the new
church, Methodists got a good name for domestic as well as
for industrial service.

When the undoubted success of Wesleyans in business is
taken into account, it must not be forgotten that the rise and
progress of their sect coincided with the period of the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries commonly styled the Industrial
Revolution. This rapid transformation of industry by the
new machinery and power afforded great opportunities to men
possessed of the economic virtues. ‘‘ We find also thousands
of young men,” said a prominent Methodist at the end of the
eighteenth century, “ who, by virtue and temperance, by
industry and economy, by happy connections and the blessing
of God on their labours, have risen from labour to affluence,
and now fill the leading situations in commercial life. . . .
Happiness and smiling plenty have been diffused through the
towns and villages in which their manufactures have suc-
ceeded.” ^ So clear, indeed, was the connection between
personal steadiness and business success that it helped largely
to recruit members to a Society which “ made good ” in both
worlds. The early Wesleyans, buoyed up by enthusiasm, kept
their virtue amid the temptations of the world. As business
prospered, they were distinguished by devotion to public and
private charities. They even gave up some opportunities of
gain that conflicted with their principles, refusing as shop-
keepers to desecrate the Sabbath, abstaining from the profit-
able practice of smuggling, and, as innkeepers, discouraging
excess in drinking. But as the early enthusiasm waned and
Wesleyanism became a family tradition, this restrictive
austerity weakened. “ Then the temptation to dilute the

^ Joseph Sutcliffe, A Remew of Methodism, cited Warner, p. 191.

37

PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

moral imperative of the divine-ownership theory, which
ordered the disposition of all money above the bare needs of
the individual for the good of the community, became acute.
Wesley and the early Methodists were felt to be too radical. . . .
Therefore a rising group of prosperous Methodists repudiated
this part of the teaching by the apparently innocuous judgment
that in this respect Wesley was simply impracticable.” ^

Thus the economic by-products of godliness, alike on the
side of industry and consumption, were more and more diluted
by Mammonism, until all that remained was a certain mood
and habit of philanthropy.

We have seen that in Wesleyanism, as indeed among
Baptists and other reforming sects, a double interacting
process takes place favourable to business success. Persons
are attracted to these religious tenets whose lives are less
occupied than those of their fellows with the pleasures and
dissipations of society, and whose seriousness of mind is
expressed in habits of forethought and responsibility. These
propensities in their turn are nourished and strengthened by
the godly life of a compact religious community, and are
directed usefully to business ends by the sense of a “ vocation.”
Both on the side of production and of consumption this careful
austerity strengthens their economic position. In a word, they
make money, and are sparing in expenditure. They might,
of course, spend all their surplus in charity, but in practice
they put most of it as “ savings ” back into their business.
This thrift was particularly “ blessed ” at a time when the
new factory system and the expanding home and foreign
markets required large new supplies of capital.

There is, however, another social factor which operates
towards business success — ^namely, the collective and mutual
self-help among the local members of a sect who are able to
trust one another and willing to deal with one another on
preferential terms. Nor is this advantage confined to the
local units of such sects. Leading church members, usually
of responsibility and means, become personally known to one
another, by conferences and other gatherings, so that the
spiritual union of such a church easily improvises useful
business bonds. The economic value of a reliable integrity
of character has been utilized by all the minor sects.

The Quakers in some ways present a unique example of a
working alliance between God and Mammon in which Mammon
has been less successful than elsewhere in establishing supre-
macy. This is partly attributable to the clearer consciousness
^ Warner, p. 147.

38 PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

of social and economic maladies in the founders of the Society
of Friends, and the larger part assigned to the redress of such
grievances in the “ concerns ” of the Society. Originating in
the same ferment of religious, political, and social thought and
emotion that marked the mid- seventeenth century, Quakerism
stood out from the larger groupings of Independents, Baptists,
etc., by the nature of its challenge to the accepted thought and
practice of the time. It was distinguished in two ways. The
principle of guidance by the Inner Light in all branches of
human conduct, while it differed essentially from the authori-
tative attitude assumed by the Calvinist churches, did not
land the Friends in the quandary of reliance on a Book whose
inapplicability to many modern problems has been so evident
as to evoke an art of spiritual casuistry . N or was the individual
judgment the supreme arbiter of right and wrong. For the
Inner Light was the inspiring and directing presence in
each person as a member of a spiritual community. In this
sense it was a collective guidance, giving rules of conduct
suitable for general acceptance. The Meetings were occasions
for sharing with one another the light which came to each
soul in regard to every activity of secular life.

Still more significant for our purpose was the close attention
given by George Fox and other early teachers to the ethics of
business life, alike on the side of industry and of consumption.
Fox, as a disturber of the existing social economy, was nearer
to the Levellers, Diggers, and other social-democratic agitators
who formed the left wing of the Puritan movement during
the mid-century. It is significant,’’ writes Miss James,
“ that Quakerism appealed to the lowest classes more than
any other variety of Puritanism,” and one writer went so far as
to complain that “ it was made up of the dregs of the people.” ^
Fox preached Democracy in its full sense of liberty, equality,
and fraternity, attacking the abuses of property and exposing
ruthlessly the causes of poverty. Though the wage-problem
did not figure prominently in his gospel, he was deeply con-
cerned with the relief of poverty and its attendant ills. ‘‘ The
Quaker plea for simplicity in dress and for restraint in all forms
of recreation was not merely an ascetic trait, or a Puritan
survival, but was based by George Fox on the principle of the
common brotherhood of man. It was a practical way of
trying to advance the more equal distribution of wealth.” ^

It cannot, however, be said that any of the early exponents
of Quakerism penetrated deeply into the economic problems

^ Op. ciL, p. 19.

® Isabel Grubb, Quakerism and Industry before 1800, p. 24.

PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS 39

of poverty and the distribution of wealth, though they, like
Wesley, protested vigorously against “ forestalling ’’ and
“ engrossing ” and other oppressive practices. On methods
of trade they held that the “ Inner Light ’’ would enable a
trader to discern the ‘‘ fair value ” of what he sold.

Except so far as a well-grounded reputation for truth,
honesty, and industry is serviceable for the business life,
there is no ground for holding that Quakerism in its early days
was an advantageous qualification for money-making. Fines,
distraints, and imprisonment were serious bars to worldly
success. Moreover, scruples regarding the undertaking of
luxury trades or the bestowal of labour on decorative processes
seriously interfered with the earning power of many Friends.
When Gilbert Labey, a leading tailor in London during the
Commonwealth, became a Friend, he gave up the making
of fashionable garments and confined his work to the plain
apparel which he thought consistent with Christian simplicity.”
In 1676 and 1677 the “ National Meeting ” took up the matter,
and pronounced against “ making and selling . . . things
which truth will not allow of . . . such they deemed to be
the merchandise of gold and silver lace, gaudy ribbons, silks,
etc., all which kind of traffic several persons who had been
concerned in, when they came to be of this judgment, did lay
down for conscience sake.” ^

As time went on and Friends acquired a considerable place
in shipping, banking, the iron and steel and other thriving
trades, a good deal of laxity seems to have crept in. In 1693
the London Yearly Meeting issued a protest against professing
Quakers “ carrying guns in their ships, supposing thereby to
defend and secure themselves and their ships, contrary to
their former principle and practice.” ^ Others seem to have
engaged in fitting out privateers, or in financing them. Perhaps
the most typical case was that of iron-masters engaging in the
manufacture of arms, which came up on various occasions
during the wars of the eighteenth century.

The part taken by Quakers in the anti-slavery movement
has been a conspicuous testimony to their sense of human
equality. And yet it seems strange how slow the movement
was towards practical achievement. It was in 1675 that a
companion of George Fox, William Edmundson, after visiting
the Barbadoes, delivered a remonstrance to Friends in Mary-
land and Virginia against slave-holding. From that time on
sporadic protests were made in Pennsylvania against “ the
buying and keeping of negroes ” and against “ bringing in any
1 Isabel Gmbb, op, cit., pp. 94^6. “ Op. dt., p. 128.

40 PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

more negroes.” But “ the Society gave these memorials a
cold reception. The love of gain and power was too strong on
the part of the wealthy and influential planters and merchants,
who had become slave-holders, to allow the scruples of the
Chester Meeting to take the shape of discipline.” So also in
New England nothing was done to interfere with this lucrative
trade until 1727, when the practice of importing negroes was
condemned. “ That the practice was continued, notwith-
standing, for many years afterwards, is certain.” ^ Not until
John Woolman had devoted the latter part of his life (from
1742 to 1762) to a crusade against slave-dealing and slave-
owning was the Society solidly converted to the cause of
abolition, and in Virginia, where slavery had its strongest
hold, as late as 1784 offenders against the manumission
recommendation of 1773 were formally expelled from the
Society. Woolman’ s general views upon wealth and poverty
may be taken as representative of the earlier Quaker teaching :
“It is equitable that some should have greater possessions
than others, so long as they use them faithfully for the good
of all.” In other words, equity was applied less to origins of
wealth than to the uses to which it was put — ^the familiar
“ stewardship ” or “ trust ” theory of economic obligations.

The Quaker connexion with baiflcing, which Cobbett assailed
so virulently, was due not merely to the saving propensity of
Friends, but to their early occupation in the two great English
industries of the seventeenth century, farming and weaving.
Both industries, as then conducted, needed temporary advances
of money, and the Qtiakers, being trusted by all, lent their spare
cash and so became bankers.^ Caution, accuracy in detail,
shrewdness in judging character, and a facility of forecast,
qualities possessed by Friends in common with the Jews,^ were
of special value in the banking industry.

^ The Journal of John Woolman, Intr. pp. 8, 9.

* “ Two of t}ie largest banking combines in England at the present
day are of Quaker origin, and have absorbed into themselves tens of
private banks foimded by other Quakers.” — Isabel Grubb, p. 165.

® How far the important part played by the Jews in modem capital-
ism, especially upon its commercial and financial side, is directly
traceable to their religion may be questioned. But Sombart, in his
important work. The Jews and Modern Capitalism, contends that the
qualities of “rationalism,” clear-cut planning and abstract reasoning,
together with what he terms their “teleology ” (conscious adaptation of
means to the end), which distinguish the Jews as religionists, are of
prime importance to successful capitalism. These qualities, whether
“ racial ” in a primary sense or only in the secondary sense, as selected
for survival in their struggle for life, have enabled them to seize the
growing opportunities wMch a capitalism, ever more impersonal and

41

PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

From its earliest days Quakerism had been associated with
industrial philanthropy. Beginning within the ranks of the
Society, schemes were devised for supplying tools and materials
to Friends suffering imprisonment. Experience in this work
led John Bellers to meet the growing poverty in the early
eighteenth century by his “ Proposals for raising a College of
Industry, of all useful Trades and Husbandry with profit for
the rich — ^a plentiful living for the poor — and a good education
for youth, which will be of advantage to the Government by
the increase of the people and their riches.”

Experiments along the line of this Proposal carried on at
workhouses in Clerkenwell, Bristol, and elsewhere, may be
regarded as the first practical beginnings in the reform of the
degrading administration of our Poor Laws. Though no
lasting effects were produced along this line of experiment,
they illustrate the wider public interest of Quakers in the
economic progress of the workers, so strikingly exhibited in
recent times.

In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when
the modern factory system was growing fast, Quaker firms in
the iron and textile trades succeeded better than others in
maintaining good personal relations between employers and
workers. The beginnings of what are now called Workers*
Welfare schemes were laid by Quaker firms in various parts of
the country, in the housing of employees, and other conditions
of life. Though the new conditions of industry and commerce
made the conception of a “ just price ” more difficult of
application than in olden times, the ordinary prevailing theory
of laissez-faire individualism that substantial justice was
obtained by buying at the cheapest price and selling at the
dearest, whether the market was in goods or services, was
never accepted by “good** Quakers. Some moral obligation
both to their employees and to the consumer was recognized,
however difficult it might be to define, or to reconcile it with
the “ law of supply and demand ** in the operation of a market.

But, though driven, or induced, to conform in the main
operations of industry, commerce, and finance to the ordinary
modes of bargaining, Friends have never maintained the

financial in character and ever more international in scope, gives to a
people who, scattered through the trading centres of the whole world,
maintain common ties of religious and racial imity. There can be no
doubt that religion has here been of most material service to successful
business enterprises, extending by close intermarriage the bounds of
personal confidence so valuable in business undertakings, and culti-
vating the sense of “ God’s chosen people ” as a fine instrument for
money-making.

42 PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

rigorous distinction which most Christian business men make
between Sunday idealism and week-day practice. They have
never sought to reconcile the claims of God and Mammon by
avowed compromises of the higher claims. This at any rate
is true of the faithful adherents of the Society. Spiritual
worldlings have always tended to leave the Society and attach
themselves to more accommodating churches. As the State
and the Municipality in recent times have taken an ever-
growing part in the regulation and even the conduct of certain
large industrial and other businesses, Quakers have generally
given approval and assistance. Not a few of the younger
Quakers have adopted the wider socialist attitude, becoming
active members of the Labour Party. Others have thrown
themselves into policies for setting capitalism upon a more
equitable and democratic basis by means of profit-sharing and
co-partnership, works committees and pensions schemes. Of
perhaps no other religious body can it truthfully be said that
the normal tendency of its members is one of constant endea-
vour to apply to business life and its economic relations
principles of justice and humanity directly flowing from the
religious creed they hold.

In summarizing the Puritan movement Mr. Tawney writes :
“ The distinctive note of Puritan teaching was . . . individual
responsibility, not social obligation. Training its pupils to
the mastery of others through the mastery of self, it prized as
a crown of glory the qualities which arm the spiritual athlete
for his solitary contest with a hostile world, and dismissed
concern with the social order as the prop of weaklings and
the Capua of the soul.” ^ Creeds holding that each individual
soul was an object of separate salvation to be achieved by its
own faith, its own works, or by the arbitrary will of God, were
disabled by this supreme concern from employing their minds,
hearts, and activities for the good of society in this world.
They were incapable of translating into effective comradeship
the teaching of Christ or of conceiving the ideal of an economic
commonwealth in which health, physical comfort and enjoy-
ment, leisure and other good things of this life, may be
achieved for . mankind. Though efforts to interpret God's
will in terms of social service were, as we have seen, occasionally
undertaken as belonging to Christian endeavour, the main
trend of the Puritan teaching was against them. Even in
the Quakers, where this spiritual individualism was merged in
the common possession of Divine guidance, there was little
disposition to seek such reforms of business structure as to
^ Op. cit., p. 273.

43

PROTESTANTISM AND BUSINESS

make the activities of Mammon subject to the teaching of
Christ as set forth in his Gospel.

Briefly summarizing the evidence, we may say that the
personal mentality and the social environment which brought
about the breakaway from the spiritual authority of the
Roman Church also made for individualism and capitalist
enterprise in the business world. People of a self-reliant,
enterprising, rationalist character, fit to achieve success in
the new world of economic opportunities that was opening out
in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, were
drawn by this same character to adopt Protestantism in creed
and organization. The moral and religious teaching of most
Protestant sects favoured an industrious, honest, orderly,
foresighted, ascetic life at a time when these qualities were
wanted for the new capitalism.

D

Chapter IV

The Churches and Modern
Economic Movements

T his brief account of the emergence of primitive religious
creeds and sentiments from the magic and animism of
man’s brooding and imaginative mind indicates how an
elementary religion, not expressly designed for securing
material goods, easily and naturaUy succumbs to these urgent
needs of current human life. For man to wrest a living from
the earth, with its ill-known contents and powers of fertility,
the irregularity and supreme importance of vegetative and
animal fecundity — these matters required all the aid which
magic and worship could supply. The magician and the priest
must be induced to lend their skilled mysterious help. God,
in his most primitive form, must do the work of Mammon :
spiritual and physical forces must co-operate in the great
economic processes for the maintenance and increase of man.
The belief in the power of the religious experts to control the
productive forces of nature, and to avert the injurious forces,
is early realized as a means of easy living by a priestly caste,
the members of which soon learn how to apply to their own
material advantage the sacrifices, gifts, or blackmail which
experience enables them to appropriate.

Thus from the earliest times a parasitic life is cultivated
by priests or priest-kings, accumulating a larger and larger
proportion of the current wealth and durable treasures which
form the economic surplus in a growing civilization. The
higher cults are no exception to this tendency of Mammon to
press his claims upon religion. The history of any of the
great world, religions bears out this tendency. Brahmanism,
Buddhism, the religions of Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, are rich
with examples of the encroachments of this lust for wealth
and economic power upon the spiritual claims and of the
ascetic practices which from time to time are expressed in
“ reform ” movements.

Christianity is rightly taken as the chief field for the mani-
festation of this unending struggle. After the early com-

44

MODERN ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS 45

munism of Christian groups waiting for an immediate Second
Coming had evaporated, and from toleration Christianity had
advanced to temporal dominion, the Church exercised a double
influence in the spheres of industry and property, regulating
the first in the supposed interest of Christian ethics, and
acquiring larger and larger portions of the second for its own
enjoyment and aggrandisement. From time to time, as we see,
movements of protest arose within the Church, attempted re-
turns to the ascetic life ; but they were either crushed as heresies
or sapped by the unconquerable cravings of human nature.
The intimate modus vivendi established between the Papacy
and Mammon during the Middle Ages, and the elaboration of
the spiritual tentacles by which the acquisition of property
was conducted, seem to the modem mind a miracle of naive
parasitism. The revolt in Britain, Germany, Switzerland, the
Netherlands and France against the doctrinal and temporal
power of Rome, termed Protestantism, had its special economic
significance in two directions. It was a repudiation of the
institutional channels through which theocracy was draining
the surplus wealth of Catholic countries, fortified in England
by the craving of new ambitious men for Church lands. Still
more important was the break-up of the restraints upon the
new forms of extra-guild industry and trade which formed
the beginnings of modern capitalism. This last consideration
has led us to identify Protestantism, especially in its non-
conformist churches, with the cultivation of a standard of life
and morals in which the economic virtues of personal industry
and adventure, reasoning, foresight and parsimony, stand out
conspicuously.

Our brief examination of certain typical forms of Protestant-
ism shows how difficult it has been to make the new demands
of a sound, successful economic life square with the precepts
of Christian teaching as expressed in the Gospels. The
general tendency was to find a solution of the problem by
avoiding close scrutiny into the origins of wealth, and con-
centrating attention upon the uses to which it should be put.
“ Make all the money you can by the honest assiduous practice
of your ‘ vocation,’ but regard this wealth as a ‘ trust,’ which,
after the satisfaction of the reasonable requirements of your-
self and your family have been provided for, must be adminis-
tered charitably for the public good.” The general Catholic
doctrine and practice of more or less promiscuous charity have,
however, been displaced by a more considered policy in inter-
preting the public good.

This avoidance of economic origins of wealth and adoption

46

THE CHURCHES AND

of the “ trust ” or “ stewardship ” conception for the employ-
ment of surplus wealth constitutes, I think, the prevailing
religious attitude towards economic problems as expressed in
the higher-minded and more public-spirited members of most
Protestant bodies. The established Episcopal Church of this
coimtry has inclined, in its ordinary preaching and teaching,
to renounce all claims to regulate business life in conformity
with Christian principles, as distinct from inculcating the
ethics of personal integrity and justice. The attachment of
its ministers to the landed interests, from whom its income and
social influence were mainly derived, early made the Church a
bulwark of political and economic conservatism. Until quite
recently, save among a section of the town clergy, there has
been little interest in social-economic problems, except so far
as particular cases were concerned, and little disposition
towards that asceticism which marked the Catholic orders in
their prime, and the Puritan sects almost up to the present
time. The Tractarian movement of the ea>Tly Victorian era,
and the revivals of Catholic discipline and doctrine within
the Establishment which followed, have brought about new
contacts of the clergy with the labouring classes, especially
in the cities, which have seriously impaired the earlier modus
viveudi of God and Mammon. A return to asceticism, partly
as a sympathetic appeal to the personal confidence of the poor
among whom they worked, has been in part also a protest
against the luxuries and extravagances of the rich as indices
of an inequitable apportionment of ‘‘ this world’s goods.”
Wherever this sense of protest became conscious, it was the
seed of Christian Socialism. From the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury a small but growing leaven of this Christian Socialism
has been operative among both the clergy and the lay members
of the Church. It has had bold and eloquent exponents from
the time of Kingsley and Maurice, and the idea of reasserting
for the Church a definite spiritual authority over the organiza-
tion and ethics of modern business is stiU entertained by
Christian Socialists in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and
even in this country. But the ordinary attitude of our
Established Church, as expressed in Congresses or other
authoritative utterances, is one of platitudmarianism, loose,
suave, non-committal, on all important proposals of economic
reform. This is due partly to a genuine disbelief in its
competency to handle economic issues, partly to its feeling of
personal sympathy with the wealthy business classes whose
assistance is more than ever needed to enable it to carry on
the recognized work of a modern parish.

MODERN ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS 47

Somewhat different is the present situation in the non-
conformist churches. While the earlier asceticism has visibly
declined both as a theory and a practice, at any rate among
those members who can afford not to be ascetic, there is a
widespread concern about the social aspects of business life
which is converting large numbers of nonconformist church
members into Christian Socialists, or into Socialists tout purs
if, as is often the case, they fall away from a Christianity
which makes no serious attempt to apply Christ’s teaching to
economic matters.

Here it may be well to consider the influence of the almost
sensational collapse of dogmatic beliefs and church attach-
ments here and among the peoples of other civilized countries.
Christian Socialism is a pathetic attempt to rally some remnant
of belief and moral authority for the churches at a time when
the exposure of the falsity or inconsistency of the doctrinal
teaching of the Christian churches has conspired with a rapid
expansion of new worldly interests, and a scientific spirit
related thereto, to bring about the obsolescence of theology.
Whether, as in Austria and Bavaria, Christian SociaUsm is a
potent though futile endeavour to restore to the Catholic
Church a temporal power which is lost for ever, or, as in
England, a new attempt to fuse a spiritual with a mundane
motive in the economic reform movement, preserving the
union of a morally respectable Mammon and a kindlier and
laxer Deity, the procedure is extremely interesting. Whereas
on the Continent the break of Socialism with the religion of
the churches. Catholic or Protestant, is almost complete, in
Britain the spirit of compromise which prevails in every
department of conduct has produced a Socialist Party, a large
number of whose leaders and adherents are active church
members. Few people in this country are definitely “ ration-
alist ” in their attitude towards religion, politics, the family,
or any other institution. Though utilitarian reasoners in
business, we are very slow to apply reason to the assessment
of any line of behaviour which carries sentimental or emotional
associations. Such minds are still disposed to ascribe separate
spheres of rule to God and Mammon. In this they have
received much assistance from professional economists. With-
out subscribing to the crude maxim “ Business is Business,”
these economists limit very severely the sphere of Christian,
or any other, ethic in its claims to regulate the economic
system. For the economic field is subject to scientific laws
which will not bow before ethical considerations. Sir Josiah
Stamp, addressing Christian reformers, as a Christian, tells

48 THE CHURCHES AND

them : “I would say whatever is economically right (i.e.
inevitable) cannot be morally wrong. For where there is
no choice or avoidance there is no moral issue.” His argument
here is expressly directed to show that the common belief that
poverty is due to unjust and alterable distribution of wealth
is erroneous. “ If the Christian ethic cannot do any better
than alter static distribution, it is bankrupt so far as its real
effect on economic betterment is concerned.” ^

The prevalent view of professional economists is that
further encroachments upon the riches of the rich, by taxation
or otherwise, will impair the incentive of the capitalists and
entrepreneurs, so reducing the total product available for
distribution, and that even were equalization of incomes
possible, the quantity of surplus available (after adequate
provision for savings) would not sufl&ce to raise the mass of
workers to an appreciably higher standard of living. Only
by producing more and saving more can an aggregate income
be got large enough to provide for a comfortable living with
adequate leisure for a whole people. So far as the Christian
Ethic is applicable, it tells the individual to work hard,
produce more, and save more. This view differs not at aff
from the earlier Puritan teaching. Its address is directed to
the individual. To industrial society, as a whole, it has little
to say, for the conception of such a society lay outside the
purview of Christ. Economic principles are only capable of
modification to the extent that “ the average standard of
motive is changed ” ; and Christianity, in the West at any
rate, has made no serious attempt to alter average standards
of motive.

But while economists support the non-intervention of the
Churches by saying there is very little they can do, and by
suggesting that any sentimental interference with the working
of economic laws would be either futile or disastrous, the
churches on their part make no attempt to develop Gospel
teaching into social-economic doctrines and policies that would
be unpopular among their prominent supporters. The older
standards of asceticism have disappeared from the Christian
churches. The bicycle and the motor-car have almost
destroyed Sabbatarianism. Even in Scotland it becomes
more difficult every year to maintain the dull austerity of
the Calvinist sabbath. In England the ban upon Sunday
games, secular music, reading, and other week-day occupations
has in many places disappeared. Mammon is ever3rwhere
gaining ground, undermining not only the religious behaviour,

^ The Christian Ethic as an Economic Policy, pp. 47-8.

MODERN ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS 49

but also the beliefs of church members. Though the direct
assaults of rationalism upon theology have doubtless played
some part in this decay of theological beliefs, the indirect
encroachments of “ this world ” have been of greater import-
ance in promoting indifference to affairs of the next. It is
not so much that positive disbelief in God and another world
has displaced the old beliefs, but that the latter have been
reduced to a tenuity which makes them no longer operative
motives in conduct. This indifference is doubtless due in
large measure to the utter failure of the Christian churches to
cope with the great emergencies of life, to make a “ gospel of
peace ” prevail when war is threatening, to curb the “ will to
power ” in business or politics, and to protect the poor against
their economic oppressors. In other words, the impotence of the
Christian churches in handling issues of the gravest moral
significance has brought them into something like contempt.
There are large bodies of men and women both inside and outside
the churches who realize this impotence. They do not become
atheists, or necessarily abandon their formal church attach-
ments. But church services, and the beliefs that are supposed
to lie behind them, have become unreal, and for their canons
of personal and social behaviour they look elsewhere. Not a
few of the clergy recognize and deplore this situation. New
grave issues regarding sex and population, art and literature,
politics and industry, arise, and nobody expects the Christian
churches to give out clear and useful utterances, or to influence
public and private conduct.

Continental Socialism, as I have said, has definitely dis-
sociated itself from Christianity, accepting Karl Marx’s
asseveration that “ the idea of God must be destroyed : it
is the keystone of a perverted civilization.” Christianity
belittles this world, preaches contentment, and serves as
“ the opium of the workers.” Our own working-class and
socialist movements have for the most part compromised here
as on all critical issues. Just as the republicanism of Charles
Bradlaugh died out of the radical secularism of the ’eighties
with the revival of imperial sentimentalism, so his thorough-
going atheism withered before the new wave of mysticism to
which the most recent philosophy and science lend a helping
hand. Partly, no doubt, it is a congenital distrust of reason
as a sufficient guide to conduct, and a repudiation of “ the
falsehood of extremes.” Englishmen are not prepared to hate
or to destroy “ the bourgeoisie.” Their reason, their humour,
and their humanity protect them against the violence of creed
and behaviour to which Russian communism has succumbed.

60 THE CHURCHES AKD

To continental revolutionists this often appears as a softness'*
of head and heart. And in a sense it is. But this “ softness **
has some place in the ‘‘ common sense ” which keeps us from
extremes. “ There was a time,” writes Dr. Jacks, “ when
theology waxed eloquent over the total depravity of human
nature. As much harm is done to-day by the doctrine of the
total depravity of the social system.” There can be no
question that the full Socialist policy of the destruction of
capitalism and the adoption of a complete state- Socialism has
little purchase upon the minds of the masses of workers in this
country, or of their leaders. There is no real belief in, or
desire for, a “ five-year plan ” or any miraculous transforma-
tion of our economic system, though there is a keen, wide-
spread desire for thoroughgoing changes in the control and
working of industry, commerce, and finance, involving govern-
mental or other representative control which shall secure
regularity of employment and a reasonable progress in the
standards of living, believed to be attainable by modem
methods of production, with securities for a fair distribution
of the product.

It is the almost complete failure of the churches to apply
Christian ethics to the theory and practice of this reform
policy that explains their loss of hold upon the people. For
economic policy has assumed an intense consciousness in all
classes within the last two generations. Its issues are grave
both in themselves and in their hold upon the minds of the
thm^ing section of every class. Now among leaders of the
Christian churches, clergy or laymen, there are two widely
divergent attitudes, though under pressure of controversy they
may be taken by the same man in different circumstances.

The first and perhaps most widely held is that Christ’s
ethics do not contain principles for social conduct in business
life. They are addressed to the individual soul. The purifica-
tion of personal character expressed in conduct would doubt-
less evoke a social atmosphere of brotherly love that would
express itself in friendly co-operation on the mundane plane.
But the circumstances of Judaea in the time of Jesus were so
remote from those which Mammon displays to-day as to make
the simple general maxims of the Gospels inapplicable.

Love your neighbour as yourself ” was a maxim feasible,
though difficult of application, in a small local economic
community where every buyer knew personally every seller,
every lender every borrower, every worker every consumer.
But in the intricacies of a highly organized national or world
market, no man knows whom he serves or who consumes the

MODERN ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS 51

goods to the making of which he contributes some fractional
share. How, then, can the maxim of brotherly love be
operative under such conditions? Co-operation has become
an abstract term with hardly any personal content. This
is perhaps what Dean Inge means when he says : “ The
standard in the Gospels is heroic and perfectionist ; it is not,
as we cannot remind ourselves too often, a code of permissible
conduct for a large community.’’ ^ It is apparently his
disbelief in the willingness of people to accept from the Gospels
their personal rules of conduct, including the disparagement
of riches and of materialism in general, the neighbourly spirit,
and all that goes with it, that makes him despondent of British
Christianity. “ The Christian Church suffers from what it is
the fashion to call the inferiority complex. We are ashamed
of being in a minority. We are distressed because our churches
are half-empty. Many of them would be much emptier if the
Gospel was preached in them.” ^

The deficient sociality of Christ’s teaching and the emphasis
upon purely personal conduct are reflected in the attitude
adopted, not only by Dean Inge, but by most Christian
Socialists, towards the economic problems of distribution.
It would seem impossible for analysts of modem economic
processes to deny that the moral gravamen of the charges
against the inequity and human wastefulness of our economic
system lies in the realm of distribution, the conditions and
processes which determine how much of the “ socially created
product ” shall go to the several owners of the instruments of
production. Yet the avoidance of all close analytic scrutiny
into distribution characterizes nearly all the economic pro-
nouncements of theologians and church members. Here is a
typical passage from a well-known American theologian.
Professor Peabody :

“ The fundamental evils of industrialism are not mechanical,
but ethical; not primarily of the social order, but of the
unsocialized soul. No rearrangement of production and dis-
tribution can of itself abolish the commercial instincts of
ambition and competition, not even the baser desires of theft,
covetousness, and deceit. A new order could not survive a
year unless administered by unselfish minds and co-operative
wills.” So “ the social order ” is not conceived as “ ethical,”
but as ‘‘ mechanical ” ! And mechanical changes of produc-
tion and distribution cannot affect the soul or the ethics of
the individual !

^ Christian Ethics and Modern Problems, p. 67.

* Op, cit,, p. 392.

62

THE CHURCHES AND

Hence it follows that the churches had best keep clear of
proposed reforms of industry and the distribution of its
product, and confine themselves to purifying the soul and will
of man !

It does not seem to occur to such theologians that
the economic environment may play an important part
in moulding and stimulating the baser desires they depre-
cate, and in repressing the formation of “ unselfish minds
and co-operative wills.” How can men love their neigh-
bours, take no anxious thought for the morrow, co-operate
with their fellows for the common good, within an economic
system which operates, partly by competition, partly by
private monopoly ? The “ social order ” is not mechanical,
as Professor Peabody conceives it, but a bad moral order in
which the thoughts and desires of men are directed to these
selfish ends by the institutions that constitute that moral
order. To tell men that the cultivation of personal virtues
can release them from the injurious bondage of such an
economic order is to talk sheer nonsense. So long as most
men are kept struggling against one another for the bare
materials of physical life, have no security for the continuous
maintenance of themselves and their families, and little hope
of improving their condition, they will remain selfish, greedy,
covetous, deceitful.

It is doubtless true that “ a new order ” — a socialist or
communist society — demands “ unselfish minds and co-opera-
tive wills ” for its successful working. But the formation of
such a society would presuppose some measure of unselfishness
and co-operative capacity, and its operation should confirm
these qualities. Whatever may occur to the great experiment
in Russia, it is unlikely that any Western people will evince
so much unselfishness and co-operative will as to make a
social reform on such a wholesale plan possible. But it might
seem reasonable to expect that our clerical moralists, con-
fronting the present instability of the social order in most
countries of the world, would come to recognize that the
political and economic institutions which largely constitute
this order are proper material for their consideration. Instead,
however, of realizing that these institutions are ethical in
structure and in working, they still confine their attention to
the purely personal factors in the social order.

This is why they have little concern for the productive
processes in economic life, still less for distribution, and busy
themselves almost entirely with consumption. For the
consumer is the individualist in the economic system, and the

MODERN ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS 63

persistent hankering after control of personal behaviour,
which we have traced throughout the history of the Christian
churches, survives to-day. If only people would not waste
their money, their time, their health and energies, upon drink,
gambling, and other light or baser amusements, they would
have enough for all reasonable requirements and could save.
They need not then entertain wicked notions of class war,
strikes, or other disturbing enterprises !

This moral individualism of the churches is thus seen to ban
enquiries into the equity and humanity of the distribution
of income and property, by two methods of avoidance. The
first is the treatment of wealth as a “ trust ” or “ steward-
ship,” the origin of which is assumed to be the will of God, or
the industry of the possessor. The second is the drawing
away of thought from the producing processes into the con-
suming. Not how wealth is got, but what is done with it
when it is got, summarizes this convenient attitude.

Thus is brought about a new reconcilement between God
and Mammon which is perhaps best expressed by an American
millionaire in one of Joseph Hergesheimer’s books : ‘‘ Christian
principles and American conceptions of business have put us
where we are.”

America, indeed, has developed the compromise into a
positive co-partnership. Mammon is to have a free hand in
the making, handing over to God (conceived as Church,
University, Hospital, Library, or other instruments of the
higher life) a quite considerable share of the spending. So if
you are a church or a college, it is highly inconvenient that your
clergy or your professors should poke their noses into the
works, stores, banks, and markets from which emerge in some
mysterious and intricate fashion the endowments and salaries
which come to you from munificent donors. Therefore, you
take care to discourage the nose-poking process. You also
take care not to be conscious of these prohibitions, so that you
may feel genuinely indignant when the charge is brought
against you of discouraging freedom of economic thought and
teaching. This is not hypocrisy, it is rationalization ” in
the psychological sense of that word — i.e., finding a “ good ”
reason for what you want to believe.

The dependence of the churches upon the superfiuous
incomes of the rich disables them from effective criticism of
the sources of these incomes and from any serious attempt to C
probe into the causes of the poverty which they profess ^
deplore. Their general attitude towards unemploymeqtr' is
instructive. In a period of bad trade when many '

54 THE CHURCHES AND

are dismissing employees, investigation of the character of
those who are “ out ” will indicate that they are usually less
efficient, less reliable, less sober, more feckless, than those who
have retained their jobs. Personal character is thus taken by
the church worker, or the C.O.S. investigator, to be the major
cause of unemployment. It is “ the fault ’’ of the unemployed
worker that he is unemployed. The assumption is that, if the
efficiency and moral character of these persons were raised to
the higher level of those who remain employed, they too would
have regular employment. Even those who are aware that
much unemployment is due to causes which lie outside the
responsibility of the worker or his employer, still entertain and
express the belief that a higher standard of industry, reliability,
thrift, and other personal factors would react upon the general
demand for labour so as to maintain it at a much higher level.
Now, though personal efficiency is a real factor in high produc-
tivity and low costs, there is no ground for holding that the
difference between the unemployed figures of 1920 and those
for 1930 is accounted for to any appreciable extent by these
personal factors.

Or take the more general attitude towards poverty. Because
the poor are upon an average less efficient workers and less
careful livers, poverty as such cannot be imputed to these
personal defects, though they determine to some extent who
shall be “ the poor.” Most of our city poor are born of poor
parents, bred in unhygienic surroundings, with poor food,
poor education, and poor training for the struggle of life.
These poor opportunities presuppose a poverty which is
attributable to prior inequality of economic opportunities —
i.e,, the unjust distribution of property and of the advantages
it gives.

Now, if the churches really felt themselves the moral
guardians of the community, they would insist upon a full and
fearless exploration of the nature of the economic system in
its distributive capacity. They would then discover that the
conditions essential to “ fair bargaining,” just prices, equal
access to natural resources, to the use of capital, education,
and most opportunities of acquiring a comfortable and secure
living, were unattainable by the great majority of members of
the community. What the clerical moralist believes, in
common with most members of the well-to-do classes, is that
the economic system normally gives people “ what they are
worth.” It contains, indeed, some hardship and injustices,
and many mischances and breakdowns, that cause personal
distress. But the system of “ capitalism ” (competitive or

MODERN ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS 65

combinatory) is substantially sound ; it delivers “ the goods ”
better than any other system that can be devised. Some of
its defects can be cured by better education, insurance, and
other public services; others by the charity of those whose
valuable services have brought them wealth !

A careful analysis of the arterial system of markets, the
determination of the prices for the use of land, capital, ability,
labour, the markets for food, raw materials, power, transport,
finished goods, wholesale and retail, and last, but not least,
the sale of credits and of stocks and shares — such analysis
would disclose a moral obliquity in marketeering, a free play
for selfish acquisitiveness, an habitual inequality in bargaining
between buyer and seller, which would shock the conscience
of the religious world. But motived by the considerations
here indicated, the churches do not attempt this moral assay,
they trust to the professors and the captains of industry, who
assure them that this system works equitably “ on the whole,”
and that no other system could succeed as well. To apply the
maxims of Christ literally to modern business would be wholly
impracticable, to attempt it would be to dry up the resources
which are needed to maintain the churches and all other
civilized institutions.

Now Western Christians are doubtless right in thinking that
a strict application of the ethics of their religion, as expounded
in the New Testament, would be incompatible with the
acceptance of modern business methods. Nor, in fact, would
it be compatible with the standards of values which regulate
any other branch of our behaviour. The trouble lies deeper
than any difiiculty of squaring economic practices with
Christian principles. Not merely the precepts but the ideals
set out in the Gospels are repugnant to the Western mind.
Meekness, love, or even forgiveness, of enemies, contempt for
riches, disregard of the body, its food and raiment, have not
been, and never will be, acceptable to any but tiny minorities
in Western nations. Western ideals are more truthfully set
forth in Malory’s Morte d' Arthur than in the Gospels. It is
true that chivalry was only the accepted ethic of a small
master class, but it was the potential ethic of all the Western
peoples, as the popular admiration for the sportsman, fighter,
lover, adventurer, chieftain, testifies. It is this futile endeavour
to fit an oriental, ascetic pacifism on to the Western tempera-
ment and valuations that baffles the comprehension of so many
keen Eastern students of our civilization, often leading them
to charge us with hjrpocrisy — a shallow rendering of the case.

Some years ago the Japanese Government sent to Europe a

56

THE CHURCHES AND

commission to study religious institutions with a view to
proposals for a religious reconstruction in Japan. The
secretary, when asked by an Englishman whether the com-
mittee would advise the adoption of Christianity, replied :
“ That is impossible, for Christianity has been spoiled by
occidentalism.”

The Christian churches are, therefore, incapacitated from
exercising moral influence over modern economic life, partly
because their adherents do not seriously profess or apply the
teaching of Christ, partly because they are aware that any
attempt to apply it would fail and would quicken the process
of dismemberment. A real Western religion, developed from
pagan origins, and gradually spiritualized in accordance with
the higher processes of civilization, in true organic relations
with Western ideals and standards for intellectual and moral
life, might have exercised a powerful “ moulding ” influence
upon modem economic institutions, infusing into them the
passion for fair play and equal opportunity, which is the
essence of the “ sportsman ” spirit, together with the sense of
comradeship capable of giving human significance to many of
the otherwise mechanical processes of co-operation in economic
life.

There is, however, a stronger case to be made for a religion,
stripped of all theology and magic, that can supply this need,
a definitely human religion which can apply to the support of
our industrial and other institutions the principles and ideals
of a rational ethic. There are moral individualists in the
ranks of rationalism who shrink from all association wdth the
name religion or the thing, who will make their own private
settlement with ideals or standards of conduct. But there
will be many others to whom this view is repugnant, especially
in dealing with economic processes and activities that in their
conduct and results are essentially corporate and co-operative.
To an ever-increasing number of men and women of this
temper and attitude the need for an organized ethical religion,
based upon a rational interpretation of human progress in the
arts of social life, will become the alternative to a selfish,
mechanical determinism with no standard of values other
than the urge of separate instincts and desires. The attain-
ability of an effective religion of this order, holding together
and inspiring by appeal to common needs and purposes the
changeful wills of men, may remain a matter for legitimate
doubt. But man is in many respects a more gregarious
animal than ever, and in many ways of living is more and
more assimilated to his fellows. In both his life and his work

MODEKN ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS 67

he can less than ever live unto himseK alone. Although the
value of his personality rests primarily in the ways in which
he differs from his neighbours, the emergence and expression
of that difference depend upon the strength and efficiency of
the common human enterprise. And this common enterprise
demands a willing co-operation of each man with the purposes
and activities of his neighbours. Such social economics
contains the essential character of a religion. For that
character does not consist in a theology, but in the enthusiasm
of humanity for a common and a worthy cause.

But though such co-operative zeal for human welfare is the
kernel of a possible religion, it does not comprehend it. Hence
ethics has not a monopoly of the religious sentiment. Science
and philosophy set no such limit upon our interest. An
attitude of curiosity and a feeling of community with nature
in its widest sense are needed to complete the new structure
of a rationalist religion. It was the failure of Positivism to
include nature, save as a contribution towards the progress
of humanity, that was responsible in part for the slight hold
Comte and his disciples attained. But there was another
reason for their failure, the parodying of Catholicism in its
dogmatism and its ritual, with the creation of new saints and
human demigods. Religion without theology, if it is to
succeed, must take man’s place in nature as its central theme.
But it demands a recognition of nature as the larger and
higher value. Nature does not exist to promote the ends of
man alone, as the highest product. It is a great independent
drama in which man plays a large, but not a separate and
absorbing role.

A rationalist philosophy will not, therefore, I think, accept
“ Humanism ” as an adequate religion. Still less will it
accept the science and art of social economics as the chief
goal of human striving. We have seen how throughout
human history religions based upon spiritual or mystical
pretensions have claimed to subdue Mammon, but Mammon
has continually got the better in the conffict, inducing or
compelling the organized churches to serve his economic ends.
Now the world is offered in Bolshevism an inverted form of
this experiment, where an economic Bible is substituted for
the Christian book, and Marx and Lenin are objects of a
genuine worship, the saints of a new social order, which
utilizes all the devices of the old religions, including the
apocalyptic vision of a millennium of prosperity following a
few years of trial and fasting. A distinctively religious attitude
of adoration of the State, its will and its perfectibility, is

68 MODERN ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS

promoted by a propaganda presenting all the features of a
religious revivalism. This God-State is as arbitrary in its
will, as repressive of private liberty of thought and action,
as cruel in its persecuting zeal, as any of the spiritual deities
that have preceded it. Whether regarded as a political or an
economic religion, it is as abhorrent to Rationalism as any of
the preposterous theologies it seeks to displace.

A rationalist religion would not commit the fatal error of
conceiving body and spirit as ultimately separate and opposed
in character and aims. Nor would it achieve a unity by
allowing the one to deny the reasonable claims, or even the
real existence, of the other, under such alternatives as Idealism
and Materialism. It would conceive man, individual and
collective, as the most finely composed part of nature, directed
in his behaviour by a more definitely conscious urge than is
discernible in the rest of the animate world. That urge in
man such a religion would claim to be rational, in that its
function is, first, to establish, not for all time but for humanity
in its present situation, some standard of values, some ideal
of a good life, then to direct the otherwise unrelated or con-
flicting instincts and desires towards the achievement of this
ideal. This process would be in substance an enlightened
utilitarianism, in which bodily satisfactions would have their
proper place along with spiritual, under a system of thought
in which the division of body and spirit is not regarded as an
ultimate division of nature. Thus the bickering of God and
Mammon would cease, and religion and economics would
achieve a serviceable co-operation, in a world where it was
made possible for everyone to “ keep body and soul together.”